Why do I think about work right now? 
Gallery Included
I also included a small gallery to the site. The gallery content comes from my images server through a php script and the presentation is done using jQuery with livequery and slimbox2.
I had to use livequery because I wanted to add a lightbox effect to the asynchronously loaded DOM for the gallery content. That’s a common problem when dealing with ajax.
This is how it looks like now:
<head>
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://js.madnet.ch/jquery-min.js"></script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://js.madnet.ch/madnet-common.js"></script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://js.madnet.ch/madnet-wordpress.js"></script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://js.madnet.ch/jquery.livequery.js"></script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://js.madnet.ch/slimbox/js/slimbox2.js"></script>
</head>
...
jQuery( function() {
$("#g .gallery").livequery(function() {
$(this).children("a").slimbox();
});
$("#g .galleryContainer").livequery(function() {
$(this).click(function() {
$(this).children(".gallery").slideToggle("slow");
});
$(this).children(".gallery").slideUp("slow");
$(this).children("h3").hover(function() {
$(this).fadeOut(100);$(this).fadeIn(500);
});
});
$("#g").load("/galleryImages/AllImages.php");
});
Off for some snow
I’ll be off for 2 days to go for some snowboard fun in Laax.
Snowboard Fun
Tuning Gigabit Ethernet on Mac OS X (10.5)
I recently bought a new NAS (Netgear ReadyNAS Duo) and attached it to my gigabit ethernet network. Unfortunately I only got transfer rates at around 10 MB/s which is really poor. I enabled Jumbo Frames (MTU > 1500) but this didn’t help much. So I did a bit more research and found out that the limiting factor was not only the MTU but the send and receive buffers.
This means my CPU was not able to catch up with the speed of the gigabit ethernet. What I did then was to increase the send and receive buffers for TCP/UDP traffic. É voilà! Now I get at least 35 MB/s. Still not the max a gigabit ethernet can offer, but I’m on the right way. I’d like to see something like 80-90 MB/s. Given the Samsung Disk can do at least 175 MB/s to/from buffer this should be possible.
I use the following parameters in my sysctl.conf:
kern.ipc.maxsockbuf=2500000
net.inet.tcp.sendspace=1000000
net.inet.tcp.recvspace=1000000
net.inet.tcp.mssdflt=7936
net.inet.tcp.delayed_ack=0
The buffers are probably too high, I know.
Building a Developer Community within a big company
In my company, we have a board of, let’s call them, chief developers. In fact it is a mixture of various people and skills along the software development life cycle. Most of the guys one would say are software architects. It’s a pretty small circle but nevertheless we are expected to trigger important changes related to what technology is used and how software is developed within the company.
Knowing that we do this beside our daily business, we thought it would be a good idea to start an in-house community for all the software developers to receive as many ideas as possible.
Our first step now is to search for a platform to host the online part of the community. We won’t go for the super-fanzy-3D-2nd-life approach like some IBM guys did some years ago…
We’ll start small and try to maintain a structure by moderating the hot topics. The most important, in my opinion, is that we receive feedback and feel what is really bugging people inside our organisation. Hopefully the community will grow quickly and proves to be a good source for new ideas.
If anyone has experience with building online communities, drop me a note.
