Upgrades

Posted on May 31st, 2004 in General, Technology by minter

I finally got motivated today to rework my home “network infrastructure.”

Up until this afternoon, I’d been using an ancient IBM P-100 PC running Red Hat Linux 9 as the NAT/firewall between my cable modem and my home network. That PC was hooked into a 5-port switch (of which one port was broken), and hanging off of that switch was a D-Link 802.11b wireless access point, my PowerMac G4, and a couple of random ethernet cables for testing. I’d been somewhat dissatisfied with this setup for a while. I didn’t really need the full power of a Linux distribution just to run the NAT. My iBook G4 has 802.11g built in, so I wasn’t taking advantage of that. And the old PC used more power and put out more heat than I really wanted.

This afternoon, while we were out taking Hayley to the doctor and getting lunch at Crazy Fire, I swung by Best Buy to look around. The price of “wireless broadband routers” has come down quite a bit since I last checked. After getting confirmation from the salesfolks that pretty much any of the routers would do port forwarding, I made a purchase.

Now, my cable modem hooks into a Netgear WGR614. It handles the DHCP, port forwarding, DynDNS updates, and everything else. It also does 802.11g wireless. The PowerMac G4 hooks into that, and I’ve got three open ports for random equipment. And, as a bonus, the whole thing is about the size of a thin paperback book, so I was able to relocate it from the edge of the house more toward the middle, to improve coverage.

So far, I’m pretty pleased with the WGR614’s features. The web admin utility is well-laid-out. You can set up static IPs, which is nice. It’s got emailable logs. Most of the advanced features are configurable, which I liked. About the only thing it doesn’t do that I was making use of before is function as a DNS server. But I just put my private IPs into the internet zone for lunenburg.org at my DNS hoster, and that took care of that.

I don’t know if there will be some horrible problem down the road, but I’m pleased with it so far.

Roid Rage

Posted on May 27th, 2004 in General by minter

I went to a different doctor today to get my foot looked at – Cary Orthopaedics. After the usual “new patient” paperwork, I got seen pretty quickly.

The doctor poked around my sesamoid bone, which hurt, and then sent me off to get some X-rays. The X-rays showed that the bone is still broken, which is apparently not a surprising thing. From what I’ve read, it’s pretty common for a fractured sesamoid to never heal, and the best you can hope for is that it doesn’t hurt. I’m not so lucky.

From the X-rays, it looks like the bone may be in two pieces now, and that the pieces may have shifted so that there’s kind of a protruding area rubbing against the tendon and the big toe bone. That’s what would be causing the pain.

He said there were three options. One was to just live with it – deal with the aching and not do anything with it. The second was to get a steroid injection into the area, which would theoretically reduce the inflamation and might somehow fix things so the area didn’t hurt again. The third option is surgery, where they’d go in and remove the broken-off part of the bone.

For today, I chose the second option. So they shot me up with steroids (yes, you can call me “Barry Bonds” now) and sent me on my way. They said to give it a month or so to work, so I have to wait until July or so and then reevaluate how my foot feels. Right now, my foot feels pretty weird – kinda swolen and tingly, but that’s probably from the shot.

So, yeah. Foot still broken.

Old Skool

Posted on May 26th, 2004 in Technology by minter

I rediscovered an old stomping ground recently. Allow me to take you back to another era, when modems were 9600 baud, pictures were ASCII art, and text was sacred. Let’s go back to . . . 1996.

Back in my college days (1993-1997), when Mosaic was just starting to bring pictures to the internet and people knew what a Gopher was, people around the world communicated over the internet via text-based sites, accessed via the telnet protocol.

I frequented a few telnet “talkers” – themed sites with different rooms where people would chat. None of them are still around – that genre is pretty much dead, even though MUDs (which I never got into) are still going. And there were a few telnet-based BBSs (Bulletin Board Systems) that I joined. The most famous, and the one that’s still going respectably strong today, was ISCABBS. I’ve had at least somewhat of a presence (usually lurking, reading a lot but rarely posting) on there since 1994 or so.

The average BBS was divided into rooms on various topics – technical, personal, fluff, etc.. People would post messages in the room one after another. You’d start reading from the beginning, and add your messages onto the end. There was no threading or anything, so you had to reference any posts that you were replying to in your message itself. But, in spite of what seem now as limitations, there was a lot of good discussion that could be found.

Back in the early to mid 90’s, the telnet BBS scene was thriving, and everyone and their brother had a BBS. Many of the most popular ones would be so overloaded at peak hours that you’d have to wait upwards of an hour just to log in. The sudden rise in the number of people at colleges who knew about the internet caused the big spike in popularity. This was before the World Wide Web, so if you were a kid from a rural area like me, you’d never seen the power of a worldwide network before.

At some point, I created an account on TigerNet BBS, based out of Hampden-Sydney College, located in Farmville, VA. I hung out for a while and, as I left college and kind of fell out of the BBS scene, didn’t go back.

Fast-forward to a month or so ago, when a posting on ISCA reminded us that TigerNet still lived. On a lark, I telnetted over to the site, used my old login, and wonder of wonders, it worked. It was like stepping into a time warp. The address in my profile was from Colonial Heights, VA, which would put my last login during the couple of months after college when I was living with my Dad outside of Richmond, so around July 1997 or so.

It looked like a lot of the people had left when I did – reading the backscroll in a lot of the forums, there are conversations that just end in 1998 or so, and don’t pick back up again until recently. I even got reminded that I used to moderate (or “RoomAide”) the Sports> forum, as the forum information was mine, as well as some posts in the backscroll where I was made the RA. Several of my posts talking about minor league baseball and the short-lived ABA women’s basketball Richmond Rage were there. Good times, good times.

I give a lot of credit to the TigerNet sysops for keeping the place online all these years – it’s practically a time capsule of mid-90s internet technology now. And the community is slowly starting to pick back up on TigerNet now – there will be 6-7 people online at any given time now, which is pretty good for ancient technology.

So if any geeks out there want to take a trip down memory lane, or if any people who missed that part of internet history want to see what it was like, telnet to the BBS or use the Java web client. And look for me on there, logged in via telnet. Just like before.

Feets Don’t Fail Me Now

Posted on May 25th, 2004 in General by minter

My fractured sesamoid bone really hasn’t gotten much better since I came off the crutches in December, and I’m finally motivated enough to get someone else to look at it. I got a recommendation for a sports medicine place in Cary, since this is apparently a pretty common athletic injury, and I’m going Thursday to get them to check it out.

Sigh.

There’s A Spider In My Room

Posted on May 24th, 2004 in General by minter

Holly was working in the yard this weekend. We’d had a trashbag of grass clippings sitting by the side porch for a while, and when she moved the bag, she found a spider behind it.

A black widow. Yikes.

For reasons I have yet to figure out, Holly (who doesn’t have the highest regard for spiders) didn’t kill it, or holler for me to come kill it. She instead trapped it in a jar for me and her parents to look at.

I don’t think I’d ever seen one up close. It certainly was as they’re described. Black, big bloated abdomen, red hourglass on the underside. I’m just glad that we found it before Hayley did.

If you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go spray the perimeter of the house with some napalm now.

Eddie From iTunes

Posted on May 23rd, 2004 in General by minter

Oh wow – the best band out there today, Eddie From Ohio, is now available on the iTunes music store. I guess the “Request a band” feature does get results.

So now you don’t have any excuse to miss listening to them. Pick up a few songs and give them a listen today.

Gimmie A Light

Posted on May 21st, 2004 in Mr. Voice by minter

At the Raleigh Perl Mongers meeting last night, Derek Lane suggested that I look at SQLite as a database backend for Mr. Voice.

I’m currently using MySQL, which works fine, but it’s a fairly heavy piece of software for how I’m using it. I don’t really need a full-blown RDBMS to store two tables for single-user access. Plus, the end-users of Mr. Voice have to deal with installing and configuring MySQL as part of the Mr. Voice install process.

SQLite is a SQL database that lives in a single on-disk file. The guts of accessing the database are built right into the driver. Or, in other words, the database driver is the entire installation. So if I switched to that, I could cross “database” completely off the list of things for the user to install. The database software would be packaged in with the other perl modules. That’s a big win in my book.

I’ve been messing with it, and I think I’ve got a mostly-converted version of Mr. Voice that uses SQLite. There are a couple of weird things I have to work around. SQLite doesn’t provide a TIMESTAMP value like MySQL does, and I use that to automatically update whenever a row is added or modified. And, even more oddly, the $sth->numrows() function doesn’t actually return the number of rows affected by a statement. I’ve found workarounds for both problems, but they were somewhat surprising (the numrows more than the timestamp).

So I’ll probably play around with this for a bit, to see if it’s a good match for what Mr. Voice does. I want to check out backup and import functionality, speed, and robustness. But things are looking promising so far.

Fishmonger

Posted on May 19th, 2004 in General by minter

I’ll be speaking at the Raleigh Perl Mongers meeting tomorrow, talking about Mr. Voice and Perl/Tk. Plus, you get to see if I can figure out Keynote well enough to put on a decent presentation.

A good time will be had by all.

Plasma Transfusion

Posted on May 18th, 2004 in General by minter

Cool link of the day – Music Plasma. Plug in your favorite musical groups and see other bands in that same universe. Follow the links to find other bands you might like.

Link courtesy of Steve

A Tribe Called Quest

Posted on May 17th, 2004 in General by minter

The graduates at my alma mater got a good commencement speaker this year – William & Mary alum Jon Stewart ’84. The text of his speech is available online.

I got to interview Stewart for the student newspaper back in 1997 or so, when he came through town and spoke to students. This was pre-Daily Show, and his star was just on the rise. I don’t remember a lot about the interview other than he chain-smoked and didn’t seem to really have fond memories of his time at The College.

Still, it’s good to see W&M grads make good. Put him up there with Glenn Close and Linda Lavin.

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