Google Calendar supports CalDAV

Google Calendar has added support for CalDAV. For Mac weenies, this means you can share calendars across multiple Macs, adding and removing events via iCal. And you can do it without paying for MobileMe.

Wonderful stuff!

Terminal.app hangs at startup

I just got bit by this bug, under OS X 10.5.4. The symptoms are that sudo hangs, and Terminal.app hangs when opening a new tab or when starting up. Console.app shows messages of the form

7/24/08 7:04:44 AM kernel devfs: ttys001: name slot allocation failed (Errno=17)

rprr posted a workaround in the above thread which worked for me. I don't know how to link to specific messages in the discussion thread (or whether that's even allowed under the terms of use, egad), so here's a recap:

1. Started Terminal. It hung up. Did Force Quit and Sent Crash report to Apple.

2. Since I had a working X11 application, I used it to open about 10 xterms using the Applications->Terminal Menu of X11.app

3. I started Terminal again. Now it works.

Doc Searls: The FCC and the Giant Zero

The FCC and the Giant Zero:

"Message to Verizon and the rest: the Internet is not about ‘consumer choice’. We produce as well as consume. We need to be able to run our own servers. [emph. added] We need to be able to exercize supply as well as demand. We need symmetricality, not just neutrality."

Amen to that.

I live in Santa Fe. As far as I can tell, my choices are Earthlink (via Qwest DSL @ 1.5Mbps) and Comcast. If I want a static IP address, a useful step to server-hood, then my rates would go up by 30%. Bah.

Netgear WAN MTU Size

(Not sure why I haven't written this up yet. It sure was a problem for a long time...)

I used to work "offsite" -- outside the home -- several days a week. When offsite my laptop could perform subversion operations against a repository on my home network, with good performance. But when the notebook was "inside" the home network, those same operations would take forever.

Eventually I stumbled on the fix, clearly explained in the help sidebar of the WAN Setup page of my Netgear WGR614 router: change the MTU to 1492. (Shades of Christopher Columbus!)

Nobody reads documentation :\

The normal MTU (Maximum Transmit Unit) value for most Ethernet networks is 1500 Bytes, 1492 Bytes for PPPoE connections, or 1436 for PPTP connections.