Recently I've encountered several instances wherein my Dock crashes (by crashing I mean hovering over it doesn't show and doing Command + Tab doesn't switch applications)

Up till recently I've just been doing a restart but since I got tired of doing it always I tried hijacking it the *nix way:

I consistently find myself moving from place to place when working. Sometimes at home, Starbucks, or any other WiFi hotspot. And it's very important to realize that different ISPs may provide different DNS traces, which may not be necessarily valid across all of them. If ever you run across this issue, try issuing the following command :