Monthly Archives: April 2007

DD-WRT Router Slowdown solved

Dev, Pals, Software

My apartment is wireless. Really wireless. No cable, no phone. But I live in the future, where the internet is involved in anything you do. So my neighbor has a wifi router that we’ve put DD-WRT on. It’s really much better than the original firmware that comes with your router, for a number of reasons. We’d been noticing a slowdown though. The router would, over the course of a few days, get slower and slower. The key symptom was that DNS lookups would be really spotty.

Turns out that bittorrent clients open up a lot of ports, especially if they are using dynamic hash tracking (DHT). The limited number of ports the router was allocating were being filled up by DHT and not released.

Router slowdown solution, from the dd-wrt wiki: increase the max number of ports and then decrease the timeout delay for those ports. I put this solution in on Tuesday night, and it’s been fine since then.

Celebrity Watch: Jay Courson

Pals, Video

Jay writes:

My buddy Tims put together a 5 minute film called
Glitch and posted it on a website called The Lot. It
is a Stephen Spielberg creation and is a platform for
budding directors to have a place to distribute their
stuff, and if enough attention is created, get the
notice of industry big-wigs (like, for example,
Stephen Spielberg) Anyway, here is the link to view
his film directly:
http://films.thelot.com/films/33107

Of course you know who Jay Courson is… He’s the guy who’s carrying the gurney.

Lost Photos of NYC

Money, NYC, Pals

Sam works for the New York City Store now as Marketing Manager.

There is a book signing tonight at the City Store that I’m going to go to. Eugene de Salignac was the official photographer of NYC bridges for thirty years at the beginning of the 20th century. His work was carefully filed away in the archives and forgotten about. Recently, Michael Lorenzini found 20,000 glass plates of Eugene’s and published them in “New York Rises – The Photographs of Eugene de Salignac“.

I suggested to Sam that she tell the Dead Programmer about the signing and he’s coming! I’m excited – Michael’s writing is some of my favorite – it’s always a pleasure when he updates and I see something new in my feed reader.

The Nanny State

Uncategorized

My coworkers were chortling behind me about some hilarious commercials.

I couldn’t help but remember that once upon a time seat belts were after-market add-ons. When the legislation came out requiring them in cars, the same kind of folks were saying the same sort of things. Security and Liberty are always a balancing act – you can’t ever trump one with the other.