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.

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?