Did you ever find that while editing files for the web (e.g. HTML, Javascript, Java/Flash/Ruby, whatever) that it would be cool to have your browser reflect any changes as soon as you hit Save in your IDE without having to Alt-Tab to the browser and hit refresh (Ctrl-R)? That way, you could stay entirely in your browser and just move your eyes to the browser as it refreshes automatically showing you the results of your newest changes.

Well, now you can! I’ve developed a pair of tools for that allow this when used in concert. Both are Open Source, of course.

Here is an example of the problem we need to solve: We have SSH access to a network, but want to access an SNMP agent in that network from a local client. We use SNMP here in this example, but it could be any other protocol that uses UDP, such as DNS or TFTP.

We’ll forward the SNMP traffic in a TCP port like this, with “socat” doing the UDP-in-TCP tunneling:

For some reason, it doesn’t seem to be possible to set up a path for your repository when using subversion as: svn+ssh://server/repos out of the box. So you end up having to specify svn+ssh://server/some/path/repos.

But it really isn’t that hard to do. Here is how I do it. Beware that you’re going to be making system-wide changes to how svnserve operates. The basic idea is to replace svnserve with our own version, that calls the original one with a -r parameter.

Imagine we’re in a rocket.

We have an imaginary engine, that provides a constant amount of thrust. How much power does such an engine provide? In essence the power depends linearly on the velocity:

And the velocity depends (by definition) on the frame of reference.

Deep packet inspection could be useful to ISPs who oversell limited bandwidth to (too) many customers. With Deep Packet Inspection, my ISP could inspect the contents and details of the high-bandwith traffic going to and from my neighbor:

Our ISP could then determine most of it to be peer-2-peer traffic, and then limit exactly that peer-2-peer traffic so that my neighbor ( :-) ) doesn’t hog all the bandwidth that we all have to share. On the surface, that sounds like a great idea? Why should my neighbor ruin the internet experience for the rest of us? There’s a catch…

I have a dream. I want to write structured documentation and source code together in my text editor and version control both together with git, just like the source code. But have it be searchable, viewable and ideally editable within MediaWiki. Is this possible?

Now, do I want to run Xen? Hmm… I’m using it to host morch.com itself, and I think its great.

Compared to VMware workstation, which is my other favorite, I love that it is open source, and I love that it is detachable. That is, I can start it and don’t have any GUI artifacts hanging around. What I do with VMware workstation is start it under a VNC server, so I don’t have to worry about the GUI, but this isn’t about VMware but about Xen. [I’ve since learned that this isn’t true about VMware workstation - it has become detachable]