Checksum Arcanius

Well, it seems that the Belkin Wireless Ethernet Bridge is not as terrible I I imagined. I ran a ping test overnight, and with almost 30,000 pings to the wireless gateway, none have been dropped. However, the latency has occasionally spiked to over half a second, presumably because of retries. I have not yet correlated this with periods of high throughput, but that is my suspicion. Perhaps windows networking is simply more fragile than I had imagined. Still, there are few excused left to avoid wiring the house, even if this is working. I mean, Gigabit Ethernet dude. Yeah.

Well, I take back the “it seems ok” comment on Firefox 0.9. I got it switched over to a nice theme (but only after my entire toolbar went wacky, forcing me to delete every item before going back to the default to get it to work properly). Then when I reloaded a page, it didn’t actually reload it, and my backwards history disappeared. I though for a while that my entire post had disappeared.

Bernie may have run into this problem himself when he left a comment on this very Blog and was unable to see it later.

Peace

Sorry for the absence. I today reaffirm my goal to post once per Ryan-day, which means at least one post between when I awake in the morning (or occasionally early afternoon) and when I go back to sleep sometime between early evening and early afternoon. Generally, these times are within two hours of 8:00 am and within two hours of midnight.

The news of the day is that the house still isn’t wired for gigabit communications, Silverfir.net came back home after an aborted attempt to set it up at my mom’s office. She needed an email server, and I thought it was a good chance to get perhaps up to 864kbps upstream for sf.net (if sourceforge will forgive me for borrowing the term). Unfortunately, it was not to be because Qwest’s Actiontec DSL modem/routers are basically defective. Bernie, tell me about Blarg’s internet-only options, and do they come with their own routers? It would probally turn into a web hosting account too, so its a good business opportunity.

Other recent events that I’ve neglected blogging about, but I should probably mention:
IS Class of 2004 graduation
TRC elections (Female CEO, Male COO, Female CFO, male CAO)
Microvision work goes well, they seem to want to keep me around
Quarter ended at BCC, got an A- in Diff.Eq. and A’s in Photo and Tennis. Maybe I already mentioned that one, I don’t know.
Went to Bellingham few Sundays ago with Shai to see Beth and Greg. Had an excellent time. Ate at Lemon Grass, the best Thai food ever. Maybe I already mentioned this one too. Bah.

Current projects:
oasis (old desktop machine, future silverfir.net server) – I want to set up exim, imap, and mysql for virtual domains so I can have lots of “different” mail servers, and that each subdomain can have their “own” emai. I also want to get apache parsing its log files out to the virtual domains. And probally get rid of ftp in favor of scp (per bob’s suggestion).

I do wonder what happened to uberbog though.

Also, I still want to change bloggers. And get a better photo management solution. And…

Oh yeah, TRC hack sessions should be starting up soon. I’ll let you know about those.

Today from 8:00am-4:00pm, Puget Sound Energy cut power to this part of town to perform upgrades to the grid. Hopefully this means fewer unscheduled power outages in the future. However, since I didn’t get home until 11:00, it also meant that silverfir faced its longest downtime in months. The good news is twofold: I was able to properly shut the computer down before this one and silverfir may soon have a new home. It won’t be much faster (sorry), but it should be a lot more reliable.

I worked 9:00-4:30 today, then I made it down to Fry’s Electronics topick up a gigabit switch, two gigabit NICs, and enough RJ54 jacks and faceplates to finally get this house wired in a semi-modern way. Hopefully the incredible speeds of gigabit lan will convince everyone to chip in some money for a high-capacity RAID file server. We’ll see how that goes.

The SIFF reviews, I guess, will just have to wait.

Having friends in high places is very nice. For example, I recieved an invitation to Gmail last night – which I hear is a highly coveted thing. So I had to brag about it a little bit. And I’m already being courted for when I get my first invitations… even though I don’t have any idea really how the invitation system works. But thats beside the point. The point is, Gmail is the best webmail ever, as far as I an tell. Except for pop3 support, it has all the gadgets that other webmails have, for free, and even more – and by even more I ean things such as autocompleting addresses – something which I never would have expected from web mail. But Gmail is different from ordinary web mail. As Tim said (who coincidentally wants an invite… :-):
“Gmail is the start of a new era of computing, internet applications.
Sucessful integration of internet applications to computers will mean
that your data can be reached from anywhere the internet is availiable.
Gmail is the start of this revolution by providing an easy to use, high
quality and large storage email provider. Once gmail supports POP3
access, it will be complete.”
Well said, Tim! It looks like your work in the TRC is beginning to pay off :-)

Today, after Breakfast, a rather dismal day of frisbee for me (althogh I still had fun), and a lot of mom-office moving, I tried out for a spot in the Simpsons Coutnerstrike Clan. I didn’t have a great showing, but I was the top dog or top three a fair number of times, and on the last map, the one they are most likely to remember the best, I was doing the best as well, so maybe I actually have a chance.

But thsi also means I ahve to do all my photography and all my Diff.Eq. homework tomorrow. Yikes.

Of course thats not the entire story. In some fo my time-wasting activities I have been researching for a future purchase of a digital video camera. The contest has come down to three candidates, which I will list in the order of my current relative preference:

Panasonic AG DVC-80
Canon GL-2
Sony VX-2100

The DVC-80 doesn’t have the 20x zoom lens that the Canon does, but it has a wider wide angle and bigger CCDs, which allow for better low-light performance. It is also newer and has better audio hookups. The GL-2 has by far the best lens of the groups in terms of zoom, but I’m not sure how useful extreme zoom is – I think wide angle is preferable for indoors shooting like I plan on doing. The Sony VX-2100 is supposed to have the best Low Light detail of the group, but its lens lacks any distinctions and it doesn’t have the progressive scan “frame” or “film” modes that the others boast, which is a feature I am interested in. They all go for slightly north of $2000.

I am also interested in picking up a Direct-To-Edit hard disk drive capture box for the camera. Although they run for around $1000, this completely eliminates the need to capture video after shooting, which adds as much time as it took to shoot originally to the editing process. Of course, the DV tapes are only several dollars, and I can keep them labelled long after they are orignally recorded as backup of original material, so perhaps that is just as good for now.

As if these things were not enough to spend my money on, a coworker just informed me that he is selling some cars – the one that piques my interest is a 1994 Nissan Sentra with 100k miles on it, going for $1500. Its smallish, white, two doors, fuel efficient and runs well. I really do want a replacement for the truck I drive now – I’m getting tired of the no-radio no-air-conditioning rides that suck 4 gallons of gas to and from work. It’d also be nice to have transportation that I could call my own. Thinking aobut it though, I think I have to check to see if its FWD or not, since that is kind of important in the driveway. Of course, that may not matter when/if I begin at the UW…