monline

I've found that in certain cases Firefox can "hang" (wait for something and not respond ) while loading a site after a click. It turns out that another possible issue is with DNS lookups.

Apple has added TRIM support for SSD drives in the 10.6.8 patch for Snow Leopard and of course 10.7.* (Lion) has TRIM support too. Unfortunately Apple decided to enable TRIM support only for Apple shipped SSD drives, so people buying an SSD from any other manufacturer have to enable this support themselves.

Using a torrent client with lots of connections my (Snow) Leopard used to get stalled (it just hangs and no app seems to be responding, but the GUI remains mostly functional though). The solution seems to be a bit of a network tweaking.

Eg. to set scheduler of iSCSI and FiberChannel devices:

"The Porting Team is a small community that specializes in porting Windows games and applications to the Mac with some tools we like to call wrappers (Cider, CrossOver, Wine)."

"Wineskin is a tool used to make ports of Windows software to Mac OS X. The ports are in the form of normal Mac application bundle wrappers. It works like a wrapper around the Windows software, and you can share just the wrappers if you choose. Best of all, its free! Make ports/wrappers to share with others, make ports of your own open source, free, or commercial software, or just make a port for yourself! Why install and use Windows if you don’t need to?"

Well, this is a classic one. The maintainer of the netbase package proposed a fundamental change in how network sockets should be managed regarding IPv4 vs. IPv6 (ie. IPv4-mapped IPv6 addresses). He suggested that the default of the net.ipv6.bindv6only kernel variable should be set to 1 (whereas the current default is 0). After "some" discussion (he and two other guys had something to say about the topic in a one and a half month period) he made the change on 6th December 2009.

Working with MKV (Matroska) video files you'll pretty soon hit on Mkvtoolnix. Using it you can easily extract any track (audio, video, subtitle) from an MKV file.

It's a bit tricky:

After that you can mount the disk device as usually:
(where n is the id of the disk device you got from the first command)

It seems that Windows by default caches the result of failed (aka. negative) DNS lookups for 6 minutes! If you're using dynamic DNS in your company, this can be pretty upsetting. Imagine: you try to check whether a virtual machine is up and running by pinging it's FQDN (eg. virtual12.example.com). Since you use dynamic DNS registration, the ping request will tell you that the DNS request failed. What you probably don't know is that the "DNS Client" Windows service will cache this reply for you for 6 minutes! You start the virtual machine and expect to be able to ping it in a few seconds. Wrong! You're DNS client won't find the IP for the virtual machine (even though the VM already registered the hostname with the company DNS server) for another 6 minutes.