the magic and evil of the MTU

2 days ago I was trying to share the internet between my two XP machines and something strange happened, I would open www.google.com and everything was fine, I was even able to do searches on it, but most other pages did not open, I had already seen this before, even on my linux box, when sharing the internet from my XP box, to my Ubuntu box, so I started digging here and there, finally found some articles that described that the problem might be the MTU (maximun transmission unit), so I decided to give that a try and sure enough that fixed the problem
I guess google and some pages somehow break the packages into smaller ones, which cause them to work ok
to find out you MTU, you can just ping any site, specifying the size:
ping -t -l 1500 www.google.com
then, if that doesn't return, decrease the size, and keep doing that until you get a result back

then go ahead on open your registry editor (regedit.exe), navigate to:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\Tcpip\Interfaces\{AdapterIDNumber}

(you may have more than one, find the one that matches the address 192.168.something)

if you see a MTU key there, modify it's value, it you don't see it, add it (DWORD), and put the value that you found out from pinging the site, this value however has to be hexadecimal value, so fire out the windows calculator and convert that number to HEX... you know, menu View, Scientific, put the decimal value, then click in Hex

you can find a lot more detail article here:
http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=319661

after you make the changes, reboot your machine and you should be good to go

to change the MTU in Linux, it would be something like:
sudo ifconfig en0 mtu 1400

salu2

The 24 hours of Delphi

yesterday we had 24 hours radio live broadcast with interviews to BIG Delphi guys, anything from Marco Cantu to Danny Thorpe, it was pretty cool that they put all those guys together and the whole event was a good idea.
here's the announcement:
http://bdn.borland.com/article/0,1410,33109,00.html

and you can find the recordings for the whole thing here:
http://24hours.rad-on.de/

the only thing that stroked me was that I checked how many users were on, and I saw up to 176, later some guys reported that they had about 300 listeners at peak times, and average of 150 at a time

300... that's kinda of (really) low for a worldwide event, isn't? or is it just me thinking this?

That's pretty sad for us, who have been Delphi developers for years and truly love Delphi, but this is reality, Borland is paying for the huge mistakes they did with Delphi 8 and Delphi 2005, and we will pay that price too. How many of you Delphi developers have moved to C# with Visual Studio? way too many I know.
Borland guys have to understand that Delphi.NET is not the #1 IDE for RAD and do something about it, they have lost a LOT of ground against MS products and even other vendors but WE are hoping that they are able to make it, unfortunately most of the developers work for companies, and companies don't like risks, and some companies bought Delphi 8, but did not buy Delphi 2005 because they got Visual Studio 2003 after the whole Delphi 8 mess, and will get VS 2005 instead of the next *killer* version of Delphi
and for many of us developers, the copy (of Delphi) that the company buys us is the only opportunity we have to get Delphi, so unless Borland comes up with a really really good product (way better than Visual Studio 2005 and before than VS 2005) and cheaper, I don't see how they would be able to come back with Delphi, I'm sure they'll still have a business with all the other products that they have, but I don't know about Delphi.

...and I really wish that time will prove me wrong on this one