Blogs

Here's how to find the optimum MTU from a Windows PC to a server. Note that you can't really have an optimum MTU that works to ALL servers, because some of them will be on networks with unusual MTUs, so pick a server and tune to it. In the discussion which follows, I've assumed your server is at 10.11.12.13. Substitute the address of YOUR server.

Suppose you have two computers -- we'll call one 'Client' and the other 'Server' -- and you're experiencing dropped frames somewhere between them. You'd like to know exactly which hop is dropping them, so you know who to call to fix the problem. Here's a step-by-step guide to identify which link is dropping your data.

Some assumptions:

My garage door opener stopped working. After experimenting a bit, I discovered that it worked only when a remote was VERY near (e.g. within 6 inches of the antenna).

I replaced the battery, tried a different remote, power-cycled the opener. No joy.

But then one day, I happened to press a button on the remote when it was inside my house, at the other end from the garage, and the door opened. Very strange.

A brief survey of some of the task/to-do list managers for Mac OS X (including some web-only products)…
Still considering:

I wanted to send all new bookmarks from my browser to pinboard/delicious. I wanted to be browser independent. I discovered that it is pretty easy to do this via Xmarks and a shell script. I run the following script from cron.

Bookmarks. I've got a lot of them. I've got a few I use often. Sometimes I think the chief value of bookmarks is that I can park something there and pretend like I'll have it when I want it.

For the moment, I've signed up for a Pinboard account, and I loaded all my Google Chrome bookmarks into it. Now I've got to come up with a policy for what goes into Pinboard and what goes into my browser bookmarks.

I always purchase my music (unless I get it free, legitimately). Once in a while, I purchase it on a physical CD. Here's how I rip CDs on my MacBook. Note that I rip to FLAC, and then generate MP3 files from FLAC for use in portable devices and in iTunes.
Here are some things I tried and didn't like:

I'm going to ignore most distributed aspects of git in this posting. This content addresses solo developer projects. Note that CWD is an abbreviation for your current working directory.

I use git on my laptop for most work, and when I have a 'milestone product,' I push that to my server.

I wanted to see the list of Amazon's new "Lending Library" books in a web browser, instead of on my Kindle.

This will do it, pretty close:
http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Dstripbooks&fie...

Had a devil of a time finding some of these. Windows key listed first, followed by Mac keystrokes. All of this is on an early 2011 aluminum unibody MacBook Pro, with Lion, Parallels 7, and Windows XP. Some of these probably apply to Vista, Windows 7, and Linux: