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Comment by mleonhard | Hacker News Reader

I originally wrote the HTTP ping tool for this blog entry: http://blog.restbackup.com/how-to-use-amazon-ec2-as-your-des...

But Posterous doesn't allow JavaScript, so I had to cut it out. Today I decided to put it online and try out several technologies:

  * My DNS Registrar's domain forwarding feature, to forward
    http://awsping.com/ to http://www.awsping.com/
  * Amazon S3's new index document feature
  * Amazon CloudFront

I'm happy to say that they all work great. But the ping script doesn't work in Opera.

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How are you getting around same-origin-policy issues with this script? I noticed the javascript debugger is reporting failures for every request: "Origin http://www.cloudping.info is not allowed by Access-Control-Allow-Origin.". Are you just counting on the request failing, but recording the time that it takes to do so anyway?

I'm using jQuery's ajax() function to make the request. The same origin policy prevents the script from receiving the data returned by the request or even seeing whether it succeeded or not. But timing is not hidden, so I can see how long the request takes.

Personally, I think JavaScript in the browser is a really ugly way to program. What could have been a simple loop or tail-recursive iteration over a list ended up requiring three continuations.

This is a pretty awesome tool.

You should consider recording everyone's times + their IP/Location. Displaying that information would be very cool.

You can sort of get that from: http://www.cloudelay.com/cdn-cloudfront.htm

There doesn't seem to be any information on how the map is generated unfortunately. I suppose DUB2 is Ireland, NRT4 Japan, SIN2 Singapore, IAD2 Virginia, and SFO4/LAX1 California.

The locations are based on airport codes.

we do that for 233 countries and 32,000 networks: http://cedexis.com/data/charts.html?country=223&provider...

We also throw away the end-user IP.

Yes, the best way to do that is by using tracking script in websites.

I'm also trying out Google Analytics for the first time. I'm still waiting for some data to show up in Analytics. They say it can take 24 hours.

Capturing and recording these latency measurements and associating them with the user's location would be fairly easy with MaxMind's free GeoIP databases and Apache module mod_geoip.

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