Lingering Projects

Over the course of the last few months, I have come across a few projects that I have not taken the opportunity to work on, and I really should. The following projects are on my short list of things to do:

  • Obtaining and reflashing a Linksys WRT54G router, either the GL or GS.
  • Playing with and/or hacking a LaFonera wireless access point
  • Building my power lockout device for my ham radio
  • Building a PC for my car with wireless capability for a media center
  • Building a decent amateur radio station, including packet station
  • Building a podcast station
  • Upgrade my radio license to General Class

At some point in the future, I want to do some kind of podcast. But before I would commit to that, I need to find a topic that I can regularly update and contribute. Part of the issue of the lack of updates is the company for which I work. MCPR has me doing some very interesting things, but they are marketable ideas that I have to keep quiet. The only project that I can talk about is our Asterisk dabblings. We are offering the ability to connect analog or IP phones to the system and connect to about any outbound media out there, including SIP trunks.

But much beyond that, I don’t have the ability to talk about the details of what I do at work with the world at large, between protecting our clients’ privacy and not wanting to give any competitors any ideas about our strategy.

Wireless Streaming Media Server

Today, I am finishing up my Streaming Media Server. It will wirelessly share music streams and setting up in-house file sharing for my music.\n\nThe hardware included a Thinkpad 390E from IBM (333 MHz Pentium II, 192MB RAM, 6 GB hard drive) and a D-Link DWL-122 USB Wireless Wi-Fi Adapter. The software I am using is Debian 3.0 stable and the SlimDevices.com SlimServer software.
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Windows 2000 == Unix? Does not compute!

Sitting in my Windows 2000 class (a required course for my degree), the instructor talked at great length tonight about Active Directory, groups, roaming profiles, and permissions. While listening to him, I ponder, “What is exactly the point of running Windows 2000?”

- Active Directory (a fundamental part of the Windows 2000 and XP environment) appears to be based on Novell’s NDS, which is in turn based on LDAP.
- Windows 2000 Native Mode Domains rely on DNS, another standards-based technology
- Roaming Profiles are the poor-man’s method of doing NFS for home directories

There are other eccentric quirks to Windows 2000 that I should cover in a future entry, should I not have more coming my way to interfere with writing it.

Playing a GAIM…

For quite a while, Gaim, my IM client, was crashing on me… I don’t know what it was, but my whole system kept locking up on me. So, I tried the latest version, 0.67, and it is amazing. It has a new look from older versions of the software and some little features that are really nice. In addition to tabbed conversations, it also can have the status icons from the buddy list right on the tabs. You could keep your buddy list minimized and know which of the folks you are talking to are away/idle/unavailable…

You can pick up a copy at http://gaim.sourceforge.net. And don’t worry if you are running Windows, there is a Windows port that also works very well.

Pardon the Cobwebs

Over the last year or so, I have had this blog and my main personal blog, and I just haven’t had a great deal to say… Having speedy internet access at school will help in a month or so, but until then, things will be sorta slow. Of course, at whatever point I will have broadband internet access, I will surely update more often. And I need to work on other content, especially in my Linux Learner’s section. I have another new design for it, just not as much content as I hoped. I have spurts of creativity, and then long droughts of very little to say. To all three of you who read this blog, I apologize. I will attempt to better in the future.

2.4.21 Released

Just a couple of days ago, the newest release of the 2.4 Linux kernel was released, after a lengthy period since 2.4.20. While there were very few truly new features, there were a great deal of improvements to existing drivers and subsystems….

And I could continue to repeat the same sort of reporting that many Linux news organizations would give you, but I won’t… What I will say is that I am really pleased with the driver changes for the ESS Solo1 sound chip. The driver actually plays audio right out of the box. There are still problems with it, however. The playback is a bit spotty. Every once in a while, I will get distortion and other problems. Usually unloading and reloading the drivers helps, but I hate to have to reboot for that! So, I went back and re-installed the ALSA drivers. Of course, the driver fixes in 2.4.21 could be entirely in vain, seeing as 2.6 is expected to use the ALSA drivers, anyway….

Now, everything is a bit quicker; there is a bit of improved performance overall.

The Matrix is Reloaded

I fire up the latest version of GAIM this morning to send a quick message to a friend of mine, Singe from World Class Mods, and was surprised to be greeted with this logo, rather than the default logo that I am so used to.

gaim-matrix-ee.jpg

This is just as surprising as the Christmas easter egg for WindowMaker. Another reason to love Linux, the authors love to throw in little bits and pieces of code in that surprise us from tie to time.

Rebuilding Blog

Over the last few days, I have had to rebuild each of the blogs on my site here. I was attempting some maintenance and locked myself out of the system, so I have taken the most recent snapshot of the old blog and recreated all the old entries here. What is missing, however are the old comments. But everything here is exactly as it was before, but some of the old links may no longer work, since the entries were recreated in a different order than they were originally created.

Thanks for your patience, since I took down the old blog while I was redoing it.

Four Days!!!

I was just so excited to hear that 3DRealms was releasing the source code to Duke Nukem 3D under the GPL. I have already downloaded the code, and while I do not have it working, I expected as much. It compiles, but when I run the binary, it just sits there. Perhaps I do not have the right data files. I’ll see if Mike or Matt Kutzman have the Atomic Edition.

But 4 days since they released the code, and the folks over at Icculus have ported the code. Now, give it a couple of weeks for refinement, and we are good to go….

Troubles with Whiners

As much as I love Linux, there are many who do not. I am willing to accept that. However, there is an individual who has requested help at a message board I visit quite frequently. The whole lot of us who post there are very willing to offer our help. However, he has started a thread billed as “why I don’t use Linux.” He claims to have spent many years studying computer science and knows a large number of programming languages. His main complaint is that the average user will find Linux more difficult than it needs to be.

I ask “Why do you feel it to be?” His response on the board has been rather lackluster and full of FUD. While I do not accuse him of being openly hostile to Linux, he is certainly not a prime example of the Linux community. He has allowed himself to believe falsehoods as well as to