I’ve been experiencing some network issues for the past few weeks. The upload for my Comcast cable internet connection would turn unresponsive for a short period of time, ranging from 2-10 seconds, every few minutes or so. This turned from an annoyance in to a huge problem after a week or so. I use Skype as my primary home phone service, using the Netgear SPH200D. During the upload interruption every few minutes or so I can hear the caller’s voice perfectly fine but they can’t hear me for that 2-10 seconds, which is no doubt frustrating on both ends. It also meant that firefox would essentially freeze for the period of time my upload doesn’t work, if I try to access a site when my upload is down. It is especially frustrating in Ubuntu since it grays out the entire firefox window till my upload is restored, since it thinks firefox has crashed.
I initially thought it was an issue with my ClarkConnect(Red Hat based) linux gateway that my network access to internet is routed through since it was experiencing some high loads due to squid trying cache too much resources. The server load returned to normal after disabling squid but the problem did not improve. I also suspected it was the network card since I popped in a new intel gigabit card around that time but was able to rule out the server completely and connecting my computer directly to the modem. Ping Plotter still showed constant interruptions where pings to google.com was completely unresponsive(red bars).
New Site Design
I was amazed at the ease of use and powerful features geared towards web design that Adobe integrated in to Fireworks CS3 when I introduced it to my girlfriend last night. The multitude of brushes themselves, including all types of color changing confetti and “alien paint”, many of which respond to pressure from the pen for the Wacom Bamboo tablet I got her for Christmas, provides all the tools a design will need. I was so impressed that I had to check out those features for myself, and there is no better way to do test Fireworks potential than to produce a real world design.
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