Been looking around for toys -errm, hardware and possibilities to build the long-discussed wireless link between me and Michiel. I think I got it now, just need a little hardware and help from Fabian… 🙂

Currently, my plan is to put a Linksys WRT54GL in a waterproof box (which I assume I can easily find at Brico), and put this on top of the roof, right next to the Yagi antenna (so we don’t get any loss over the antenna cable, plus save some money). I will pump up the default 30 mW transmit power to 90 mW (which is what the chip is actually rated for, and close enough to the allowed 100 mW). Power will be supplied over the ethernet cable (so I’d need an injector and something to take it back out, the WRT’s don’t support PoE natively). The ethernet cable will then run down the building, go inside via an air hole for the garages; through 2 neighbours’ garages, back out at the back (that’s where our terrace is), then back into the house through the window of our serverroom, et voila.. Connectivity(tm). Or so I hope it will be…

Waterproof box: 5€ (?), WRT54GL: 75€, WAPPOE: 60€, UTP: No idea. Toys for the boys…

Update:  since I actually bought a new wireless router (Asus WL-HDD) to play with, we should be able to use our current WRT54G instead of buying a new WRT54GL. Good, cause LDLC doesn’t have them in stock anymore 🙁

One nifty ‘bug’ in Norton’s Personal Firewall… this tells you all about it 😉 Updated info shows this only works when your IRC client is writing logs to disk – it doesn’t actually work when only traveling over the network. Which is odd in itself. Anyhoo, putting this in a channel topic could surely screw a lot of people’s IRC connection.

Next up, you may want to check this screenshot out … and run a virusscan on your PC 😀

Came home to find the garage half flooded. Not the first time this happens. Sigh. Neighbours’ garages also flooded. Big fun. Architect must die.

Not the first time I’ve been bitten by this — tip of the day: if your computer is connected to the powerline by a power brick thingy with an on/off button … make sure it’s not easy to hit it accidentally. Especially not multiple times.

I’ve got a server here with a “Promise FastTrack ATA100 IDE RAID controller” … Yay 2 extra IDE ports with semisoftware RAID. Not all too useful in a 1U box with 2 drives, unless you’re into that semisoftware bios-windows RAID crap. So… don’t connect anything to it, and all is well, right? Not exactly. When you do that, all you get on boot is a message saying it didn’t detect any disks, hasn’t configured any RAID sets, and asks you to press CTRL-F to enter it’s BIOS or Esc to continue booting. Phew, okay, that’s fine, let’s just wait like 10 seconds and see if it continues booting. Nope, not after an hour either. Why the *bleep* do you have to press Esc to continue booting … especially in a server! Even if you have a disk connected but haven’t configured a RAID set it will stand there waiting for your Esc. (note: configuring a single-drive RAID0 array does the trick there). Add to that there was no option in the BIOS to turn off the controller… So I dug out the PDF manual from Gigabyte.com.tw and found the jumper to turn it off.

But how irritating is this?! I have a Tyan board that also has that controller on board (but with a BIOS option to turn it off) and it does the same thing if you don’t shut it up… Retarded if you ask me… 😐

In the middle of a cleaning session… a big appartment takes a lot of work to get cleaned up :s

Yesterday we went to Fnac, because of the “Buy 4 books, get the cheapest one for free” action. We didn’t actually find 4 books to buy, so we still saved. I bought Dan Brown (author of the Da Vinci Code)’s new book: The Delta Deception (in Dutch however), and Diana bought “Head first Java” published by O’Reilly (about the only publishing house I buy computer books from). She decided yesterday she wants to learn programming, and after some comparisons of programming languages, Java was the outcome.

We’re 2 chapters far now, just reaching into OO. The book is pretty well-written, not boring like most books are (e.g. the book we used to learn Java at Rega), so that’s especially good for her, as she doesn’t really like learning from books. I’m there with her and together we wrote her first little programs in Eclipse. I don’t know how much she remembers of it the day after, but I will try to help her until she can do what she really wants to do with her programs 🙂

Somewhere this week I changed my firewalling script so that on start it would clear out all the tables and start fresh with my rules. Some time afterwards I noticed I could not reach certain sites, such as Ebay, modules.apache.org, mininova, and others – I didn’t see the connection immediately though.

When clearing out the rules it also automatically cleared out the “clamp mtu to mss” option Debian’s pppd script enabled before… after putting that back into the tables, everything started to work fine again.

Took quite some debugging, as I first thought this was a pmtud issue, and that was supposed to solve it… Another thing learnt, another thing to remember when similar problems arise 🙂

Went to the “vakantiesalon” today, at Brussels Expo. Arrived there at 15:50, saw it all at 16:50, back home at 18:05 (!). Bad weather, snow, traffic jams, and lots of unnecessary-fog-light people on the road 😉

The vakantiesalon is quite small compared to the motorshow we went to last time, with one of the three parts totally dedicated to France (which we weren’t interested in at all); so that’s why it didn’t take very long to see everything else.

What struck me is that many people weren’t interested in selling anything at all, possibly cause they’d been there for too long already). For example, there were a few interested people waiting at a desk, but the woman behind it was simply sitting there reading some book, paying no attention to the visitors at all. Customer service, sure.

A band in the Irish pavillion playing Scotland Brave, that was very odd, too. I must be missing something 😉

WordPress installation testing beep beep beeeeeeeeeep.

I’m in the process of converting my weblog to WordPress to be able to spend more time on blogging instead of developing software for it 😉 I had so many things to post about but never got around to them…

Older posts may look a bit funny html or ubb-tagwise, cause my own thingy used [b]ubb[/b] tags while wordpress uses html… Expect a post soon to get you up to speed on what I’ve done and am doing currently 😉

I’d like to propose a law that “possibly addictive games” HAVE TO put a clock somewhere on the screen so you know how much time you’re wasting… 😉

Armagetron is one of those games. It’s a tron clone, and it simply rocks (byebye KTron :D). That said, I’m going to be busy in the next hour… *g*