Archive for May, 2007

Will Crappy Channel Assignment Kill Wi-Fi?

Monday, May 14th, 2007

Too Much Wi-Fi
I’m not making this up! Everywhere I go, and even at home, I have a problem with Wi-Fi. People are making bad channel assignment choices; everything from choosing the same channel as their neighbor or picking something outside the range of non-overlapping channels (1, 6, and 11 in the USA). The hotel I’m staying at right now is using 8, which (as I understand it) means they are fighting with channels 6 and 11.

Is this why Wi-Fi is slow everywhere I go, or is it something else? At home, I had to put in some short runs of structured cabling because iTunes kept dropping its connection to my AirPort Express.

Posted in internet | 1 Comment »

What’s in the Mac OS X version of Silverlight 1.1 Alpha?

Tuesday, May 1st, 2007

I downloaded Silverlight 1.1 Alpha and poked around until I found out where the .NET stuff lives. Here’s what’s in the bundle:

$ cd /Library/Internet\ Plug-Ins/Silverlight.plugin/Contents/MacOS/
$ ls
  CoreCLR.bundle                          System.Core.dll
  IronPython.Modules.dll                  System.SilverLight.dll
  IronPython.dll                          System.Xml.Core.dll
  Microsoft.JScript.Compiler.dll          System.dll
  Microsoft.JScript.Runtime.dll           agclr.dll
  Microsoft.Scripting.SilverLight.dll     agcore
  Microsoft.Scripting.Vestigial.dll       slr.dll
  Microsoft.Scripting.dll                 slr.dll.managed_manifest
  Microsoft.VisualBasic.dll

And check out what those DLLs are made of:

$ file System.dll
  System.dll: MS Windows PE 32-bit Intel 80386 console DLL

But what’s this thing? Man, that’s big!

$ file agcore
  agcore: Mach-O universal binary with 2 architectures
  agcore (for architecture i386): Mach-O bundle i386
  agcore (for architecture ppc):  Mach-O bundle ppc
$ ls -l agcore
  -rwxr-xr-x   1 502  admin  16083600 Apr 26 03:16 agcore

So how much of those DLLs are managed code? Do they contain Win32 code, and does agcore have some magic in it for bootstrapping Win32 code?

Posted in emulation, mac, programming | 2 Comments »