I’ll be on the road until Tuesday. Things will be quiet around here until then.

Note to George Thielmann: hope your wife isn’t a covert CIA operative.

At home, I have a Linux box that I use as a server for various things. I connect to the Internet using a cable modem, and I have a Linksys router that I use to share the connection among three computers, including the Linux box. The router forwards port 80 and port 22 to the Linux box so that I can view Web pages on it and so that I can connect to it via SSH from external networks. I also use DynDNS to assign a hostname to the router so that I can connect to the Linux box easily regardless of my current DHCP-assigned IP address. Everything works as expected, except that when I connect via SSH from an external network, the connection regularly hangs for a couple of minutes and then goes back to normal. I don’t lose my connection, I just can’t send any more input or receive any output — it’s like extreme lag. I don’t ever have this problem downloading Web pages from the server, and when I connect to the machine on my local network at home, I experience no such lag. Any help diagnosing this problem would be appreciated.

Update: someone suggested a firmware update. Given that I haven’t updated the firmware in spite of the fact that I’ve had my router for about three years, that seems likely to be the problem.

If you read my review of Michael Oren’s Six Days of War, you may also be interested in this Tony Judt review of the book from 2002. Judt, of course, provides much more context than I did, because he’s a professional book reviewer and I’m a software developer who enjoys reading history books.

Are there any weblogs where the comments from “editors” are made by actual editors? (Generally denoted by italics and a little “–Ed” identifier.) I’m genuinely curious.

Ned Batchelder wrote a defense of exceptions in response to Joel Spolsky’s argument against using them the other day. Having read both articles, I can see the huge difference between exception handling in C++ (which I don’t write), and Java (which I do write). Exceptions are much more unobtrusive in Java, where the compiler will reject your code if you don’t do something with potential exceptions (unless they’re runtime exceptions). In Java, exceptions provide a wonderful means of dealing with exceptional conditions, because you have to deal with them one way or another. Even if you ignore them, you have to make it explicit that you’re ignoring them.

Mozilla 1.5, Firebird 0.7, and Thunderbird 0.3 were all released today by the Mozilla Foundation.

Some readers sent in additional suggestions for my parents’ computer in response to my Hinternet item from Monday. Here’s a list:

• AdSubtract, a commercial ad blocker for Internet Explorer. My idea was to get my parents to use Mozilla, but if they insist on sticking with IE, AdSubtract looks like a good backup plan.
• Also on the browser front, Opera was recommended. My only hesitation with Opera is that I know both IE and Mozilla better than I do Opera.
• On the personal firewall front, ZoneAlarm was recommended, as was Kerio Personal Firewall.
• For handling malware, Ad-aware was recommended.
• As an alternative to VNC, Windows Remote Desktop was recommended. Unfortunately, they didn’t order XP Pro.

Joel Spolsky argues against throwing exceptions in an item today. I have to say that I’m a bit aghast, because using return codes instead of exceptions strikes me as utterly and completely retrograde.

Note: the ensuing discussion makes for interesting reading.

Danny O’Brien’s discussion of registers of conversation is just about one of the most perceptive things I’ve ever read.