Modern internet routers contain so much buffering of packets they defeat TCP’s congestion algorithms. The end result is high latency on your broadband connection. If your home router runs linux, you can mitigate this latency using QOS (i.e., traffic shaping). My home broadband connection is rated at 12Mbps down, 1Mbps up. Using the CBQ script from the Linux QOS howto (linked above), I set the upload speed parameter to 3⁄4 of my available bandwidth, and the download speed parameter to 13⁄16.

A new version of Debian stable has been released! My firewall machine, entropy, is currently running the “old” Debian stable (etch). Sometime soon I’ll update to the new stable release, Debian 5.0 Lenny. Just for reference, here is how I will update: edit /etc/apt/sources.list, change all occurrences of etch to lenny, then run these commands as root: aptitude update aptitude install apt dpkg aptitude aptitude full-upgrade when it is done, then I’ll have to reboot to start using the new kernel.

I’ve been looking for some programs to restore functionality I lost when I left kde 3.5. glipper is an ok clipboard history application. although each entry only gets 99 characters. liferea is almost as good an RSS Reader as akregator-kde3 (and MUCH better than akregator-kde4). evolution is a mixed bag. it’s great for contacts, calendars, and imap, but LDAP won’t work, so no corporate address book, which is going to be a problem.

the first one I tried, liferea, has most of the good points from the kde 3.5 akregator: feeds with unread articles stand out with bold text, and the number of unread articles is tucked up next to the title. if there are no unread articles, there is no number. simple yet effective and readable at a glance.

I can’t believe I’m typing this. I’m logged in with gnome as my desktop. I’m going to use it on all my computers for the next few days or a week and see how it goes. KDE4 bothers me this much. KDE4 keeps getting better, but I believe it will take at least another year to reach the polish of KDE 3.5. and I’m finding that in ubuntu, gnome is actually MORE polished than my beloved KDE 3.

so debian etch is totally rocking. It was a fun experience just reading the installation manual. The manual was impressive, I’ve not seen a work which conveyed so much information in so little words. Let me explain what I mean by that; I, as an expert Linux user, found the directions extremely helpful, easy to follow, with just the right amount of hints along the way. However, a Linux newb would be hopelessly lost.