Improving my home wireless network

I noticed my wireless connection was a bit slow this morning, so after restarting the router (standard "IT Crowd – Have you tried turning it off and on again" approach), I thought it would be worth seeing what other wireless networks were nearby and whether they might be causing some contention for bandwidth.

Years ago I used NetStumbler to do this kind of thing, but it hasn't been updated in a long time and doesn't work with the wireless card on my laptop. Instead I found inSSIDer. It does the job nicely - this is what it revealed:

My network is the orange one named 'Gardiner'. I've obscured some of the labels to protect privacy.

After switching my router's wireless settings to channel 5, it now looks like this:

That looks better.

Other options for improving my wireless performance would be upgrading the router to something that support 802.11n (my trusty old Billion only handles 11b + 11g), and maybe getting a wireless repeater to improve coverage around the house.

White men can't?

It is very important to test out new play equipment before letting the kids have a go :-)

NDepend v4

I read today that NDepend v4 is now released.

Probably the most interesting change is the addition of CQLinq – a LINQ language for querying the code base that supersedes the old “CQL” query language (that was more SQL-like).

It also includes support for Visual Studio 11 and a new API to make creating your own static analyzer(s). There’s a full list of new features in the Release Notes.

Upgrades from v2/3 are half the cost of a v4 license.

If you haven’t upgraded from v3 to v4, you can still download the latest v3 from the downloads page (it will say that your v3 license key isn’t valid for v4 but give you a link to the v3 download)