cmurray.org

This is big news (if you’re a geek like me). “Dropbox is the easiest way to store, sync, and, share files online. There’s no complicated interface to learn. Dropbox works seamlessly with your operating system and automatically makes sure your files are up-to-date. Available for Windows, Mac, and Linux.”

It really is that simple. Dropbox places a folder on your desktop. Anytime you drag another folder or file into the Dropbox folder it is instantly synchronized and available to your other machines running Dropbox. In addition, you can also right-click on any file or folder and create a private URL to that resource. Sending that URL to someone gives them instant access to that resource. In addition, and by default, if a folder contains images, they are displayed in a very cool gallery format.

Signing up for an account gives you 2GB storage. If you recommend friends and they sign up, you get additional free storage. Larger storage options are available for a reasonable fee.

I now have Dropbox running on my workstation, my Windows laptop, my Mac laptop, and now my iPhone. Brilliant.

This is going to be of interest to only a very small, select crowd.

Here’s the deal. I do all of my design and development work on my local PC. Once I have finished a piece of work, I upload it to a staging server where it can be reviewed by the client. Once the client approves of the new work, it is uploaded to the live, production server.

The problem is my local machine, which runs WinXP and Apache, is painfully slow. Not because the machine itself is slow (it’s souped up with lots of speed, CPU, and Memory), but something else. When I load a page locally, it seems to take forever; the same page on either of the external servers loads within seconds. I should note also that this slowness appears primarily on Firefox.

I’d been Googling for this for a while until I came across this (http://weblogs.asp.net/dwahlin/archive/2007/06/17/fixing-firefox-slowness-with-localhost-on-vista.aspx):

It turns out that the slowness is caused by an IPv6 issue with DNS and can easily be resolved by turning IPv6 support off in Firefox while doing localhost testing.  To make the change, type about:config in the address bar, locate the network.dns.disableIPv6 setting and double-click on it to set it to true.  This does the trick for the Firefox localhost issue on Vista and everything is running fast again.

Kudos to the guy who figured this out. My pages load beautifully now. I went the extra step and disabled IPv6 on the whole machine.

Oy, when I read this I realize how truly geeky I am.