Daily Cup of Tech

Darth Vader invokes fear in most people.  But, if I heard his them on one of my hard drives, the fear, while very real, would be for an entirely different reason!

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I’m certain that is would probably be faster than using it today at my parent’s home over a 14.4 modem (I’m serious)!

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I am no developer.  I prefer quick and dirty scripts that can get stuff done which, to be honest, I am too lazy to do myself.  But, one of the things that I thought was lacking is the ability to perform multithreaded actions through batch scripting.

Well, Case Else: has come to the rescue by providing a two part tutorial on how to perform multithread actions using batch files!  From the website:

Multithreaded applications have the potential to run much faster than single-threaded applications, given the right circumstances. With batch scripts, we often write routines that spend a lot of their time waiting for other things to finish; downloading sets of files, for example, or pinging a range of servers to see if they are alive. Blocking functions (ie, where the scripts stalls until they are done) that spend their time waiting for other things are the big beneficiaries of multithreading. With some care, we can get the same benefits by ‘multithreading’ our batch scripts.

I have a number of batch scripts in my repository that could benefit from something like this. I feel some recoding coming on!

• Part 1
• Part 2

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Everyone today is all CSS and AJAX.  But there are some really cool and useful old school HTML tags that can really perk yo your website or blog.

Here is the complete list:

1. <cite>
2. <optgroup>
3. <acronym>
4. <address>
5. <ins> and <del>
6. <label>
7. <fieldset>
8. <abbr>
9. rel
10. <wbr>

To find out what they do and how to use them effectively, check out 10 Rare HTML Tags You Really Should Know.

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I have yet to try this myself but I have to admit that I am intrigued by the idea.  According to this howto, you should be able to configure your system to tunnel IP data through the DNS port from your computer at home, allowing you to surf the Internet even if all other ports are blocked (at least, that is how I understand it to work).

From the website:

You’re sitting in an airport or in a cafe, and people want your money for Internet access. They do allow DNS traffic, though.

If the ISP allows DNS traffic to any DNS server (and not just their own), you might consider running OpenVPN on UDP port 53 (thanks to Norman Rasmussen for this suggestion). If they don’t, however, NSTX comes to the rescue. NSTX is a hack to tunnel IP traffic over DNS. NSTX (IP-over-DNS) seems cool, but you cannot get it to work. You’ve downloaded the latest version, maybe because you saw it mentioned on Slashdot. You’ve looked at the nstx project page and the freshmeat page. You even tried reading some confusing documentation. Maybe you gave up and tried OzymanDNS. But curiousity got the better of you. You really want to use this.

Once you’ve followed these instructions, you basically have a remote proxy, providing you with access to the Internet. Communication between you and the remote proxy is over NSTX.

Adding this to my “Gotta Try This” list!

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