My laptop has decided that it is a good time to start not booting properly (as I mentioned yesterday). As a result of this and of the holidays, Bad Comics will be on hold until probably the first week of January or so. Thank you for your patience and forbearance in these trying times and please have a very Merry Christmas and Happy New Year.
The router at my office is dying a long and lingering death. I have a feeling that it may have a bug in it. Not in the software; I think there may actually be a literal insect somewhere in the innards of the machine. It drops connections more or less at random and has to be restarted on average once every three days or so. In between times it will arbitrarily decide to drop its connection to our DNS servers (I’ve set it up with OpenDNS because it tends to work better than whatever the defaults that Bell uses). The result of these drops is that new websites load in a very piecemeal fashion if they load at all. Some will not load their CSS and so will just show up as bizarrely unformatted text. Most just don’t have pictures loading.
There is a relatively easy way to fix this. Open up a command line and type
ipconfig /flushdns
As far as I can work out, this clears out the DNS cache and forces it to re-load. I usually wind up using this several times per day. Eventually I got to the point that I was annoyed enough with running it that I took a couple of minutes to make up a batch file to do it more simply.
I opened up Notepad and typed in the above command. I saved it as ‘flush.bat’ and tossed it in My Documents folder. I right clicked and sent a shortcut to the desktop. I dragged the shortcut into the Start Menu. Now I can launch the batch file from Launchy (an absolutely fantastic application launcher) without having to open up a command prompt at all.
