It is the Linux kernel, yes: TCP window scaling was switched on by default in kernels since about a year ago (and in Vista too, I think), and one of our routers or firewalls doesn’t like it. We’re trying to get them upgraded, but it takes a while…

Ah, the trick word: TCP windows scaling. A quick google turned up a workaround in John’s Tidbits blog:

There are 2 quick fixes. First you can simply turn off windows scaling all together by doing

echo 0 > /proc/sys/net/ipv4/tcp_window_scaling

but that limits your window to 64k. Or you can limit the size of your TCP buffers back to pre 2.6.17 kernel values which means a wscale value of about 2 is used which is acceptable to most broken routers.

echo “4096 16384 131072” > /proc/sys/net/ipv4/tcp_wmem echo “4096 87380 174760” > /proc/sys/net/ipv4/tcp_rmem

The original values would have had 4MB in the last column above which is what was allowing these massive windows.

In a thread somewhere which I can’t find anymore Dave Miller had a great quote along the lines of

“I refuse to workaround it, window scaling has been part of the protocol since 1999, deal with it.”

That worked for me. I think Dave Miller is right, but can’t resist reading Scintilla and Postgenomic.com on my desktop too ;)

However, my Wii does not have the problem, which makes me wonder if it is a disagreement between the Nature server and my Linux kernel… Anyway, this is what the two website look like (first Scintilla, then Postgenomic.com):

(BTW, that was one very nice piece of work by Rich ! Make sure to also read the follow up ).

The only real disadvantage is that it does not integrate well with the things I do daily. If I see some interesting post, and would like to tag it on my del.icio.us account, I have to google for it on my desktop :(

(You thought I was going to talk about F@H or so, didn’t you? :)

Postgenomic.com makes use of the rel=”conference” attribute for the <a> element. I’m not sure how they distinguish between upcoming and finished conferences (will need to check the source code ). But I think some manual processing is done, for example, to extract conference details, like title, location and dates. I assume the URL is used as unique identifier. Additionally, the conferences are not ‘tagged’ yet, which should be possible too, as Postgenomic.com already associates tags from blog items with articles mentioned in that item. But this is likely a temporary ommision.

I already saw ChemConf2006 picked up from an earlier post by me. Unfortunately, because it is an online conference, it does not show up on tha map :( The following two conference do have a physical location, and I hope the will appear on the map. If you wonder why I mention only these two, they are the two I will attend in the next 8 weeks, and will have presence of open source bio- and chemoinformatics software developers (at least one, me).

• Netherlands Bioinformatics Conference , April 24, Ede, The Netherlands
• Workshop Chemoinformatics in Europe: Research and Teaching , 29 May - 1 June, Obernai, France