Stuff I Do

I have Comcast for my home internet connection and I have the 16Mb pipe. The cable modem and wireless router sit in the basement and we normally work from the main floor. The problem is that I am not seeing any speed at all on my connection. And by no speed I mean 3Mb down and 400k upload.

If I go straight from the cable modem to my laptop I get over 20Mb down and 1.5Mb up. Crap that kind of points to the router as my problem. It is a Linksys router running the OpenWRT. The reason I am using this firmware instead of the stock is that I wanted to get rid of my internal servers to save power and the last service I needed to provide was internal DNS. OpenWRT gives me that ability. Since I have no other routers anymore to try out, I can either downgrade the firmware to the stock release from Linksys or buy a new router and see what kind of speed I get there.

Arrrrgggggghhhhhh!!!!!!!

UPDATE
So running some tests all through the same router with the same OpenWRT software build on the router.

I have two laptops I am testing with and here are the results:
HP Pavilion ZV5000
Wireless speed: 6Mb
Wired speed: 13Mb

MacBook Pro
Wireless speed: 4Mb
Wired speed: 13Mb

The uploads were all around the 400K speed.

Looks like I need to find a way to tweak the wireless speeds and the upload speeds.

UPDATE #2
On the router I disable the G-Mode Protection settings.
HP Pavilion ZV5000 now at 7Mb
MacBook Pro now at 10Mb

UPDATE #3
Now on the router I have set it to only G mode and got rid B settings.
HP Pavilion ZV5000 no at 9Mb
MacBook Pro now at 11Mb

Don’t think I have any more B mode devices anymore, but that could be an issue if I come across a long forgotten device.

UPDATE #4
Got my uploads figured out now. No longer capped at 400k I am now getting 1.5Mb uploads.
Apparently even though the QoS Service is disabled, there is a setting called QoS Overhead Calculation which by default is on. Once this setting is also disabled, everything uploads quickly.

After all this I kind of feel bad for gripping at the Comcast people on the phone when it was not them that hosed the connection. {blushes} I hate being that jerk.

One of the cool features of FireFox for the linguistics challenged like me is that it will spell check items in a textarea of a web page. If you misspell it, there is little red line that shows under the word and you can right mouse click on it and select the correct spelling of that word. The problems for me is that I get a little too quick on my clicking and from time to time, select the Add To Dictionary option which is directly under the list of other options for the word you misspelled.

To clear the word from the custom dictionary you need to find the persdict.dat and open it in a text editor and removed the wrong entry. On Windows XP you will find it in C:\Documents and Settings\username\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\unique.default And on Mac OS X it is located at /Library/Application Support/Firefox/Profiles/unique.default

MySQL has a cool command called

SHOW TABLES;

which will list out all the tables in the current database.

I wanted the same ability in Microsoft SQL Server. To get the same info you would issue

SELECT NAME
FROM {databasename}..sysobjects
WHERE xtype = 'U'

Replace {databasename} with your database.