Blue Violin

Nuke Vista's Auto Tuning

So I got my shiny new Thinkpad T61p and have been configuring over the last few days with my shiny new MSDN software and other must-have, can't-live-without software.

Vista comes with a new-and-improved TCP/IP stack that takes advantage of faster network connections. It works great... most of the time. Unless you're connecting to a 64-bit Windows 2003 Server then you'll get network performance that's just slightly faster than having pigeons carry your packets.

Here's the secret sauce:

• Open up a command prompt with Administrator privileges
• type the following:

netsh interface tcp set global rss=disabled
netsh interface tcp set global autotuninglevel=disabled

• No need to reboot; simply disconnect & reconnect your network cable or if on wireless, disconnect & reconnect from/to the wireless network

My limited undestanding is that Auto Tuning allows the client to tell the server how much data can be sent in a packet before waiting for an acknowledgement. I encourage you to read the details on Microsoft's new TCP/IP stack (also included in the forthcoming Windows Server 2008) especially if you have servers that are connected to each other via a high-speed gigabit network.

Skydiving...

The big news I promised in the last post is a bit late. I am now an honest-to-goodness full-time employee of Blue Violin where I'll be able to focus my energies on world domination and kick-ass software. I'm consulting to pay the bills (damn kids insist on eating everyday!) while BV spins up. In that realm, things are really looking up with about 3-4 really good prospects for pilot customers or, as I prefer to call them, virtuosos. I'm very excited and if any of my 3 4 readers (thanks Anne!) need some black-belt software kung-fu, give me a buzz at josh dot watts at blue-violin dot com or look me up on Facebook.

Skydiving... while building the parachute on the way down.

Atlanta StartupWeekend

I'm sure all 3 of my readers are already aware but Lance Weatherby is leading the charge in organizing Atlanta StartupWeekend. You can sign up here if you haven't already.

We also have a battle of the micro social networks. Nate Clark, of Wamily created a social network for the gathering; I also created a mini network on CrowdVine. I hope you register on both networks because they each bring a little somethin' different to the party.

Wamily is an interesting application so I encourage you to take a look at it and as Nate says, it's still pre-release so be gentle when poking around. I think it's important to support each other and to me that means trying out products from local entrepreneurs and help promoting them.

I met Tony Stubblebine, founder of CrowdVine, at SoCon last year and I'll admit he was ahead of the curve when it came to mini networks. I honestly thought it was a cute application but didn't see the potential. However, once I started using CrowdVine it quickly won me over. It's not Facebook or Ning but it doesn't pretend to be either; it's simply great at what it does which is help people to connect before meeting at a conference/unconference/gathering. O'Reilly used it for Foo Camp which is as good an endorsement as you're going to get.

Also, big news later this week.... yes, I know all 3 of you are atwitter with anticipation.

Javascript Goodie

Here's a quick Javascript tip. If you need to create a variable but won't know the name of the variable until runtime, here's a quick way to do it without using eval:

var foo = "wackyvariablename";
window[foo] = 123;
alert(wackyvariablename);

It also works for Javascript objects too:

var foo = "wackyvariablename";
var someobject = {};
someobject[foo] = 123;
alert(someobject.wackyvariablename);

Javascript - it's the new lisp.