NOTE: This post discusses a specific problem which is solved by disabling Nagle's algorithm. Do not try this at home: Nagle's algorithm is implemented in TCP/IP stacks for a reason, and I'm told that 99% of programmers who disable Nagle's algorithm do so errantly due to a lack of understanding of TCP. Disabling Nagle's algorithm is not a silver bullet that magically reduces latency. While developing an input-only VNC client for Android to act as a remote mouse and keyboard, I noticed that mouse pointer movements were particularly jerky when connecting to a computer running TightVNC.

While developing Android applications, I'm often juggling lots of Android machines, both real and virtual. Since I often need to connect to these machines over the network with adb connect, I found it useful and educational to write a small home screen widget that always shows the device's IP address. This is a pretty dumb application, but I decided that it would be a good opportunity to learn how to publish apps on the Android Market.

An on-screen trackpad and keyboard allow a computer to be remote controlled. Valence supports mDNS service discovery (aka Bonjour or Avahi) to locate participating VNC servers on the local network. In my spare cycles recently, I've been tinkering with developing Android code to control home theater components. As someone who has been passionately involved with the consumer electronics industry over the past ten years, my personal home theater system includes quite a collection of disparate devices that defy even the most feature-rich universal remote controls.

While using Mac OS, I've been missing the handy Linux inotifywait utility—it's a simple program to use the Linux inotify facility to wait on certain file events. I sometimes write scripts that use inotifywait to automatically launch programs when files are changed. For instance, I can have a script automatically compile a program whenever I save the source file in the editor. It turns out that Mac OS and other recent BSD operating systems have a similar kernel facility called kqueue, and it was really easy to whip up a small program to block until an event occurs on a file.

DES, the Data Encryption Standard, was developed by IBM and the US government in the 1970's. Today, DES is considered to be weak and crackable, and a poor choice for anyone in the market for an encryption algorithm. However, many legacy protocols still use DES, so it's important to have implementations handy. I recently found myself looking for a simple standalone DES implementation to study. Most of the open-source DES implementations are either highly optimized into obfuscation, or sloppily written.

In my previous post, I mentioned my frustration that certain Android phones (including my HTC EVO) cannot receive multicast datagrams. I'd like to get feedback from my friends and colleagues about multicast support on their phones, so I wrote a simple app for testing multicast. The Multicast Test Tool continually monitors the network for Multicast DNS (mDNS) packets while the app is running in the foreground, and presents the contents of these packets to the user.

It looks like some (most?) HTC phones running Android, such as my HTC EVO, are not capable of receiving multicast or broadcast datagram packets over the Wi-Fi network. This means that apps which rely on such communication will fail, often with no indication of the problem. From the app's perspective, no obvious error is happening — it can only assume that no other devices on the network are transmitting such datagrams.

I collect data usage statistics on my home broadband connection using a script that polls my router's WAN interface counters via SNMP once a minute. Since I have all this data lying around, I thought it might be neat to chart my broadband usage for 2010 and get an idea of how much of a bandwidth hog I am. My usage includes lots of movie streaming, VoIP phone calls, and work-related applications (since I work from home).

-- The IPv4 address space is nearing exhaustion. The unallocated address pool is currently expected to be depleted at the IANA level in June 2011, and at the Regional Internet Registry (RIR) level in January 2012. Networks will need to transition to IPv6, which allows for an astronomically larger address space (among other nice features). IPv6 has been around in some form since 1995. However, since network operators are human beings, the consensus has not been to methodically migrate to IPv6 over the last 15 years, but rather to procrastinate 15 years and then pull an all-nighter on the eve of exhaustion.

It turns out that it's not too hard to customize the dashboard widgets that come with Mac OS X, since they're implemented in HTML and Javascript. You can just copy the stock widget from /Library/Widgets to ~/Library/Widgets and go to town. In the above picture, you can see how I've hacked the calendar widget to show week numbers. Update, April 7, 2011: Due to popular demand, I've posted a diff of my changes here, based on the Snow Leopard calendar.