Not VLAN woes (by )

Ok, having eliminated all VLANs from the equation, I still see iTunes connecting to daapd giving up a few tens of seconds into each song. So it looks like the latest release of iTunes doesn't like daapd for some reason.

However, SMB performance is still dreadful, with common "server disconnected" error messages.

I've confirmed it's not the LAN at fault (unless subtly so) by doing HTTP, SCP, and telnet-to-chargen and getting good rates.

Right now I'm trying an experiment with smbclient rather than the smbfs that comes with Mac OS X - and it seems to be running fine... so it looks like there's some problem between OS X's smbfs and the version of samba I have, which is just bizarre.

Perhaps I ought to set up Appletalk sharing - at least that way Sarah can access the household music collection, anyway...

Mew – Mum (by )

Mum and Dad had to come up and see us as they currently have no vechile and we have two!

But obviously a long train journey when you are supposed to be elevating feet has made her condition worse 🙁

Then on top of that she has a lump in her breast - its quiet large - we are hoping its the cellulitis but she has doctors apointments and stuff this week 🙁 She is supposed to be seen as soon as possible but obviously being stuck here thats a bit awkard 🙁

Jean Walking :) (by )

At 11:02 this morning I saw Jean walk from the stairs to the setee!

This is the first definate walk either of us has seen though its lickely that she is walking at nursery.

Since then she walked from the kitchen to the front door as daddy was going to get a sack of coal from the little garage and she didnt want to be left behind! Unfortunatly this expadition was cut short by the fact it snowed last night and she had bare feet and mummy unlike daddy is strict about the whole cold feet thing!

BUT... Jean is walking!!!!1 Sarah bounces

HTTP caching (by )

Yesterday I configured Squid on my internal network; machines on the office LAN can use it if configured to use an HTTP proxy, while machines on the wifi LAN are forced to use it as a transparent proxy via port forwarding on the router (I'm slowly making the wifi LAN more and more like a cheap ISP's network - it's an open wifi, so I'm keen to force its users to be well-behaved).

The thing is, watching Squid's logs, I was horrified at just how few pages it felt it could cache. I'd always imagined, when developing Web apps, that anything fetched with GET could be cached for a while (and might even be prefetched). So when I actually dug a little deeper, I found that just about anything dynamically generated (including quite static pages that just use a bit of PHP to automatically include the same navigation in every page, with the currently selected option highlighted, for example) is, unless the script author has made special effort, generally not cacheable.

You can check the cacheability of pages with this useful cacheability testing tool.

Blog software is terrible at this, for example, despite generally having very cacheable pages

Rather than explain the rules in detail here, I'll link to somebody who already has. In particular, read the section on writing cache-aware scripts.

Read more »

Pesto (by )

I like Pesto sauce with pasta, and so does Sarah - as long as it's freshly made pesto, as encountered in restaurants. I'll tolerate pesto sauce from a jar, which she won't, but I still vastly prefer the fresh stuff.

One day I'll set up the resources needed to make it, but in the meantime, today we found a way of reviving jar pesto... we were having gnocci with sun-dried tomato pesto, but were both craving garlic, so I decided to liven the pesto up by pouring a bit of oil into a pan and frying a crushed garlic clove, then adding the pesto, then the gnocci.

The result was YUMMY. Not in the way that freshly made pesto is, but in a different way; the garlic somehow took the bitter edge off of the pesto's taste, and made it lovely instead.

I plan to experiment with doing this to other types of pesto and seeing what the result's like - but I'd still like to make my own fresh pesto sauce one day.

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