Here is a neat trick to limit the amount of bandwidth you get from a specific IP or web address. I setup a box for my last company that used this technique to simulate sever and client being in different locations, great for performance testing. It uses a BSD command called ipfw or IP Firewall, which allows you to create pipes and queues to simulate any sort of network conditions. In a terminal type the following, replacing the x’s with an IP address:

ipfw add pipe 1 ip from xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx to any

ipfw pipe 1 config bw 5000kbit/s

Now you will get a maximum of 5000 Kbit/s form the IP address you entered. You don’t even have to be root to do this.

You can also use this to limit say the amount of bandwidth you give a particular IP address, great for when people are leeching off you, just swap from and to. This setup is an example of Dummynet.

I’ve been using my hackintosh for a good bit now and its fully updated. I recently got a Dell X1300 pro 256 MB (RV516) PCI-e graphics card. It seems this is some hybrid card which is branded as an X1550 else where and has a different ID on each output.  This means the card can not CI or QE, which is kinda important in OSX land, eg: VLC has serious problems playing video via openGL. To add insult to injury this card can’t display BIOS or boot info on Apple Cinema Displays, it seems it doesn’t do Digital DVI from boot, but I could be wrong. 

Okay, to get this card to display boot/BIOS screen, this is what I done:

I went down the HEX editing route mixing V BIOS’s but I bricked the card a couple of times. Used the ATI BIOS by-pass trick to get it back and flashed it form a 4 MB PCI card. Long story short, used Rabit to edit an MSI X1300 (RV515) BIOS bin file to have the same SSID and Device ID as my X1300 pro and then flashed this to the card. This gave me boot up and BIOS display. When the OS driver takes over it treats it as the proper card, don’t know if this has implications for voltage changing, but sure who needs it on a passively cooled card anyway.

To get it to work in OSX (sort of):

Get the latest Natit.kext and edit the Info.plist, change Alopias to Caretta and you get  resolution changing and working display but still no CI/QE.

I’m chatting to a few people on Insanelymac so I’ll be back with an update soon.

If you’re uploading files, you of course use localhostr, well now you can do it without opening a web browser. Here are apps for both Windows & Mac to put files on localhostr straight from the desktop. Find out about them on Jon’s blog or download them here.

For my FYP (Final Year Project in College) I needed to take thumbnails of web pages and I couldn’t find a solution online that worked. There was only one entry I could find in relation to it and that didn’t seem to work either, but did give me an idea. I looped through the contents of the frame, putting each ‘control’ item to string and then took an image of the contents of that control. I’ll stick up a demo project if anyone asks, but here is important part:

Window2 w2 = new Window2();

        void TheFrame_ContentRendered(object sender, EventArgs e)

        {

            for (Visual v = TheFrame; v != null; v = VisualTreeHelper.GetChild(v, 0) as Visual)

            {

                if (v.ToString().Contains(“WebBrowser”))

                {

                    w2.Image.Source = new DrawingImage(VisualTreeHelper.GetDrawing(v));

                    w2.Show();

                    break;

                }

            }

        }

Feel free to use!!!