DNS Settings

So, I'm not quite sure about how Google manages redirects, nor am I 100% sure that I'm configuring things appropriately with my domain registrar, but here's what's going on now:

• www.sw-dd.com is CNAME'd to ghs.google.com (should pull data from Google Sites' servers, à la sites.google.com/a/sw-dd.com/www/home
• http://sw-dd.com (the naked domain) is A'd to a Level-3 host (the way Spot Domain does URL redirects)
• *.sw-dd.com is A'd to the above Level-3 host
• blog.sw-dd.com is CNAME'd to ghs.google.com (and configured in Blogger)

All this means that users should be able to access the Google Sites' page via either www.sw-dd.com or just sw-dd.com, and the blog via blog.sw-dd.com .

Of course, it's kind of weird to do set up the URL forwarding, as it stands now, the URL forwarding redirects traffic from sw-dd.com to www.sw-dd.com, which theoretically requires 2 domain lookups, hits ghs.google.com, and then Google forwards the appropriate data.

The funny thing is, sites.sw-dd.com is currently also CNAME'd to Google, and theoretically should redirect people to the login page for Google Sites, not the site itself--which is confusing.

To be honest, I think Google should become their own domain registrar, and offer domains to people themselves. It be awesome to just point, click, register, and have everything configured appropriately.

How do you redirect your naked domain?

UPDATE

Well, everything seems to be working OK for now. The main naked site and www work as expected, as does blog and sites as subdomains. Hooray!

H.264 Rendering Performance

The Premise

My friend Ben pointed out that VLC uses significantly less CPU power to render videos, so I decided to take a look at various implementations. In this post, I'll take a look at what that means for a particular video to be rendered with consistent platforms, and post the findings.

The Video

I've decided to go with a Google Chrome HD spot. It's decent quality enough, and should be fairly-easy to render.

The Hardware

I'll be using my MacBook Pro (2.8 GHz Core 2 Duo w/6 MB L2 cache @ 1.07 GHz FSB; 4 GB DDR3 @ 1.07 GHz; GeForce 9600M GT w/512 MB VRAM) for the tests.

The Software

I'll be using the latest version of Windows XP (SP3+2600_090203-1234) and OS X (10.5.7+9J61); Quicktime (7.6.0+1290); Quicktime Player (7.6+472); VLC (0.9.9a+7786caa59f; Windows:+f013825670); and the Flash plugin (10.0+r22). The interesting thing about Flash is that all the browsers delivered roughly the same performance utilization on both Windows and Mac (since the Flash plugin does most of the heavy lifting).

The Results

I must be honest, I'm very disappointed with Apple on this one. Below is the CPU utilization (out of 200%, 100/core) for the same video rendered in Adobe's Flash plugin, QuickTime Player, and VLC:

Shorter bars are better: