I would like to wish you and your family a pleasant and peaceful holiday. I hope that it is a time of peace for all, wherever in the world you are, whatever religion you believe in, and whatever culture you are part of.

Not long ago, my trusty NetGear started being very sporadic with its wireless connectivity. I noticed that at times connections would just drop, and short of going all the way upstairs (the office is on the first floor, the tech center is on the second) and unplugging the router, I would be dead in the water.

I searched for a while and finally decided on getting the WRT54GL Wireless-G Broadband Router, since I could upgrade it with the DD-WRT open source firmware. This firmware is very nice in that you can do so many interesting things with it. The two major features that come to mind are the ability to increase your xmit power on the wireless. The range is from 28-251mW. DD-WRT documentation suggest 60, and I can say that I got an excellent signal all throughout the house and garage.

The other feature worth mentioning is the QoS. Now, I can insure that P2P apps get pushed to the back burner when I need to do something more important like VoIP.

Upgrading the firmware was quite straightforward. The article called “turn your $60 router into a $600 router” from LifeHacker helped quite a bit, as did the documentation from the DD-WRT wiki.

If you’re looking to upgrade your router, you could do a lot worse than this setup. Go buy one of these routers and get the DD-WRT firmware. You’ll be glad you did. :)

This really is old news by now, but, in case you’ve missed it, Visual Studio 2005 Service Pack 1 was released last week. You can download it here. Release notes and some of the things addressed are available here.

I installed this thing last night… Good God, it took a long time to install (approximately 40 minutes). The biggest plus in my opinion: Web Applications Projects are now included. The web site project model that was introduced with the VS 2005 RTM was a piece of crap, and I was so glad to see the Web Application Project introduced as an after-market installation by Scott Guthrie. Integrating this into the SP was a nice touch.

This little piece of wscript works wonders when you’re attempting to determine where you live in the active directory.

Set objADSysInfo = CreateObject("ADSystemInfo")
wscript.echo objADSysInfo.UserName

You can put that into a file called FindMyDN.vbs, and then execute it with wscript FindMyDN.vbs from the command line. Voila!

This is a very interesting concept. MacHeist.Com is declaring this The Week of the Independent Mac Developer, and to get more attention to these titles, has put together a collection of some fantastic software packages for a tremendous price of $49.

The current bundle is:

• Delicious Library
• FotoMagico
• ShapeShifter
• DEVONthink Personal
• Disco
• RapidWeaver
• iClip 4
• One Pangea Game
• NewsFire
• TextMate

Any one of these applications alone could be worth $49. However, all 10 are being sold for that price. The individual bundle so far is worth $307.74.

The best part of this is that for the holidays, each of the participating developers have agreed to donate 25% of each bundle to a charity of the customer’s choice. So, even if you have one or two (or three as it was in my case) of the applications on the list, you can still feel good about purchasing the bundle.