Syntax highlighting for code blocks.

My blog used to have ugly display of source code, and I've always been a bit jealous of sites with pretty syntax highlighting for their source code. Well jealous no longer, I've now started using SyntaxHighlighter in my blog. You can find howto directions here. Here' a small sample: C Sharp: ![CDATA[Console.Writeline("Hello World!")]]>Python: ![CDATA[print "Hello World"]]>If there is demand I'll go through some of the old posts and re-highlight th...

Read More

Using wireshark to trace localhost traffic on windows.

(If you don’t care why this works and just need a recipe, switch to this post) Capturing network packets on localhost doesn't work on windows. The reason is windows doesn't send loopback traffic far enough down the networking stack for wireshark to see it. To make sniffing work on localhost you can route your ip traffic to your default gateway. I'll walk you through this, and along the way you'll see: netcat - telnet on steroids (nc.exe) tshark - command line network sniffer from the wireshark package. powershell jobs - background jobs from the shell! Step 1 - launch the server...

Read More

That's fast

Geeks born before the 80's had wet dreams about getting a T1 line. A T1 was 1.5 Mbps ~ 0.19 MB/s. Here's a picture of a large download on my home wireless network which connects to the world via cable:Gotta love technology. How long before 1 MB/s is sl...

Read More

Why twitter can be awesome

If you were born before the 80's (heck maybe before the 90's) you have some idea what twitter is but can't understand what it is for.   Well, I've been thinking about twitter and I have a few ideas. A tweet (a message on twitter) is a short (140 char max) thought you broadcast to the world.  Now the 'magic' of twitter is this: people can decide to listen to your message, only if they want to.  If you think a tweet is stupid, it is because it isn't written for you, instead of complaining about the tweet, you ignore it '.' This should sounds familiar, it is how broadcast works...

Read More

Pretty Printing XML on Windows.

It happens to the best of us, we get some ugly XML string with no formatting, and we need to view it, ideally in a formatted fashion. XMLLint is the answer. Ugly XML is the input, nicely formatted XML is the output. Finding a version of XMLLint for windows was a challenge till I found this project: http://code.google.com/p/xmllint. Unfortunately this xmllint requires an xml filename as input, and I wanted a version that takes xml on stdin, and produces pretty xml on stdout(*). Luckily this project...

Read More