The First Honest Cable Company Ad...

Via my own awesome (and honest!) ISP, Eric W. at SDWISP:

TeleHash...

A new wire protocol with some interesting attributes...

Bram Cohen is Whining...

...but I think he's got some reason to be pissed off, and you can read why in his post TCP Sucks.  If you don't know of Bram, he's the inventor of BitTorrent, and he knows a thing or two about moving data over a wire.  But he's most definitely not part of the academic and industry “good old boys” network that controls digital communications standards...

A Next Big Thing?

OpenFlow just got an absolutely enormous (and convincing) endorsement...

Router Blues...

Recently the router (a 10 year old Cisco 806) that connected us to the Intertubes started having intermittent problems.  The symptoms were really quite annoying: it would work just fine for some period between 30 seconds and a week, then suddenly conk out completely.  To “fix” it, we had to power it down, wait a minute or so, then power it back up.

That annoyance has been removed.  I've replaced the venerable Cisco 806 with a Buffalo Technology model WZR-HP-G300NH (at right, click to enlarge), flashed with DD-WRT (open source router software).  This single $80 router replaces not only my malfunctioning Cisco 806, but also a separate Cisco wireless router.

So what was it like to replace that Cisco 806? 

Installing the Cisco in the first place is something I remember well.  I was already reasonably familiar with the arcane Cisco IOS configuration files before I started that job.  Even so, to set up the 806 I had to learn a few new things.  It ended up consuming an entire weekend, and involved many failed attempts before I finally got us up and running on the Intertubes.  For months afterwards, I tweaked one thing and another until I finally got it all working.

Now contrast the more recent experience of bringing up the Buffalo Technology router.  There were just two steps.  First, I downloaded the latest DD-WRT version and flashed the router with it.  Elapsed time: about 10 minutes.  Then I used the built-in web pages to explore and configure the router.  Elapsed time: about 10 minutes.  Then I plugged it into power and the network, and … it all worked on the first try.  I've not had to do any tweaking at all.

Awesome job, DD-WRT folks.  Just awesome.  And much appreciated...

Protocol Sequence Diagrams...

A handy little reference site for this obscure bit of knowledge that's only interesting or useful to the geekier amongst us...

Talking Private IP to Private IP...

Non-geeks: just look away.  This won't hurt you.

Very clever networking hack that allows one server on a private IP address behind a NAT to the Interenet talk to another such server behind a different NAT to the Internet – without requiring any firewall holes.  I haven't actually tried the code yet, but if you're a networking kinda person, the explanation of how it works is fascinating...