Random Neurons Firing
Thoughts about Software, Networking, and Life
Category: Software
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About eighteen months ago I migrated a small Javascript app to use Snowpack development tooling. (This was mostly for fun, I had already had it working with Webpack.) Snowpack claimed simple dev tooling with nearly instant updates, using the power of ES Modules. It worked pretty well. About six months ago, the team that developed…
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macOS Monterey ships with a tool that measures the responsiveness of your network connection. It saturates the network with traffic for 20 seconds, then measures the rate of short transactions to compute “Responses Per Minute.” Big numbers (above 2000) mean your network remains responsive when the network is heavily loaded. Small numbers (under 800 or…
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[From the Archives of Amusing Technology…] Back in the ’90s, Dave Fisher and I created NameD•tective, a Macintosh control panel that gave any Mac on the Dartmouth network a static DNS name. It used Name Binding Protocol to let someone create a DNS name based on their name plus their AppleTalk zone. The DNS name…
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Last month, Comcast released a paper Improving Latency with Active Queue Management (AQM) During COVID-19 that shows that their PIE AQM dramatically decreases lag/latency (by a factor of 10X — from 250 msec down to 15-30 msec.) From the paper (page 13): … As explained earlier, for two variants of XB6 cable modem gateway,…
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A WireGuard VPN provides a fast, secure tunnel between endpoints. It uses public/private key pairs to encrypt the data. If you have several clients, you have to enter their public keys into your server. Keeping track of those keys gets to be a hassle, since ordinarily, the keys are essentially random numbers. I found a…
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I use Jetpack Publicize to share my posts on Facebook and Twitter. This makes it easy to create a single WordPress post and have it show up on social media sites. Those services automatically use the Featured Image of the WordPress post, plus an excerpt of the title/text. There’s another cool feature: Facebook and Twitter…
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I have reworked my blog so that the primary domain name is “Random Neurons Firing” (instead of the pedestrian richb-hanover.com). Same content, but a better name. I’m also adding a new topic to those I’ve previously covered (“Software, Networking, Life”). Over the last two years, I have gone to many planning and zoning conferences to…
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A while back, I was greatly confused by SQLite date and time functions. It took me a while to figure out what was wrong. (It was my error: I hadn’t observed the rule that dates must have this form “YYYY-MM-DD” – four digit year, two-digit month and day.) Nevertheless, I found that the documentation wasn’t…
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I have been using Local by Flywheel and really enjoying it. It does two things: You can stand up a development version of a WordPress site on your laptop and horse around with it. It’s fast, you can make experiments, and if it blows up, you can simply regenerate in a minute or two. Using…
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Connecting ResNexus and TripAdvisor We wanted our room availability to show up in TripAdvisor and other online services. There are two basic steps, where you tell Reservation Nexus and TripAdvisor how to find each other’s information: Use Reservation Nexus Availability Exchange to share your room availability Use TripAdvisor TripConnect to link up your business to…