3 Things I Learned This Week 2015-02-15

Nimbletext is neat

It’s kind of a text transform and templating tool. You can enter text in one pane and apply a transformation on it. An example application is generating INotifyPropertyChanged properties. These are tedious to right manually even if you are using a framework that provides some shortcut and utility functions.

Check it out at nimbletext.com.

Wifi Interference is Horrible

So after ranting and complaining on twitter about my internet speed with Comcast, I finally got on a live chat with their tech support looking for answers. The tech asked if I was on wireless or a wired connection. So while he was sending a “reset signal” to my router, I ran upstairs and got a Ethernet patch cable and connected the laptop directly to the router. Suddenly my speeds were far more than the 50Mbps I was paying for.

After some research I determined that my problem is wireless interference. My neighborhood is all 4-unit duplexes: so each building has found individual wireless networks. Switching devices to a network in the 5GHz band greatly increased my speeds.

Sorry Comcast, while there are still plenty of reasons to be upset with you, this turns out to not be one of them.

git merge-base

git merge-base finds a common ancestor between two branches. Useful for some merge operations or tricky rebases.