I've noticed for some time that it seems whenever comcast dns is not working (and this is *very* frequent, for periods of 15 seconds to a minute, as often as not), that neither do any other dns servers. I ran a test just now, periodically doing lookups through comcast and through 4.2.2.1, and there appeared to be a very high correlation between failures of the two. At the same time, I was also running a ping out to google, and it never missed a beat. This would suggest that either comcast is proxying dns traffic, or does some weird traffic shaping on port 53.

If you want to do text templating, but are turned off by JSP, you might want to take a look at Jamon. Jamon templates can received typed parameters, support template inheritance, and a wealth of other features. It's very much inspired from perl's Mason.