Everything that comes out of Dossy, from the strange to the banal.
del.icio.us/dossy (RSS) links since January 21, 2008 at 09:00 AM:
I recently helped a friend of a friend with a wireless networking setup who has a Seriously Large House–we’re talking easily 10,000 sq. ft. per floor, and the house has 3 floors. Yeah, it’s that big. They had set up a Linksys WRT54G and two WRE54G repeaters and, no surprise, had horrible signal coverage and frequent packet loss, and this was just trying to provide connectivity to a single floor in the house. Needless to say, they were not pleased, so I was invited to take a look and fix things.
I’ve always heard good things about the third-party firmware DD-WRT, so I decided to give it a shot. I picked up two WRT54GS routers ($70 at Amazon.com) and installed DD-WRT on them. I also installed DD-WRT on the WRT54G they already had.
Oh, a word of advice–if you recall, I bought one of those WRE54G’s back in May 2007–don’t waste your money on them. They cost more than the WRT54GS, can’t run DD-WRT as far as I know, and they only have one antenna, which means losing half your bandwidth per repeater hop. There’s absolutely no reason to use them, whatsoever–unless you’re not willing to figure out DD-WRT, of course.
So, I configured one WRT54GS as the master which has the WAN uplink providing network access to the wi-fi cloud. The remaining WRT54GS and WRT54G were configured as repeater bridges, all with the same SSID to facilitate roaming which worked perfectly–only one (!) packet dropped when roaming between AP’s. I did crank the power up from the default 28mW to 60mW which made a significant difference in signal range and coverage.
With this, there’s reasonable coverage on the first floor, but most importantly full coverage on the second floor which is where they were most interested in. The third floor gets good signal strengh in spots, but that’s adequate for now.
Overall, for the price, the Linksys WRT54GS is a fantastic product and when used with DD-WRT, can be used qutie effectively.
It’s been over two years since we’ve taken the photo album down on the family website, shiobara.com–June 2005, to be exact. It’s time to give it some proper care and feeding. The first step was to replace the old site with WordPress, which required some changes to AOLserver in order to get it to work right. I then created a new theme that’s a little less cluttered and with colors that aren’t quite as offensive. Here’s a “before and after” set of screenshots:
(shiobara.com, before)
(shiobara.com, after)
I realize I have no graphic design ability–hell, I can’t even coordinate colors when I dress myself. Someday, I’ll find someone who’s ridiculously talented and wants to do the graphic design for me to save me the embarassment of doing it myself. Until then, I’ll just keep hacking away at it myself.
Now that the site is all in WordPress, the next step is to clean up the photo album. I took it down back in 2005 and wanted to redo it, but never got around to it. So, recently, I’ve started working on a Media Gallery plugin for WordPress that uses jQuery, jCarousel Lite and ThickBox. It’s pretty slick, and once we’ve launched the photo album, I’ll release the plugin as open source. If you’d like a sneak peak to beta test it, just ask.
Tags: family, photos, WordPress, plugins, web design, jQuery
In the “scratch your own itch” department, I decided to get WordPress working under AOLserver. WordPress is written in PHP, and while AOLserver can load PHP as a module, it doesn’t play nice when you configure AOLserver with multiple virtual servers. The other option, running PHP as CGI using nscgi and php-cgi, does work for the most part. However, there were a few issues I ran into that required changes to nscgi, which I’ll outline below.
PHP expects an additional environment variable, REQUEST_URI, to be included on CGI requests. Of course, this isn’t part of the CGI/1.1 specification. Basically, PHP expects REQUEST_URI to contain the Request-URI (from the HTTP/1.1 specification, see section 5.1.2). So, I added this in.
In order to map an URL to be handled by nscgi, you previously had to make the change in your config .tcl and restart AOLserver. One of the great things about AOLserver is the fact that you can modify some settings at runtime, without a restart. So, I looked at whether it would be possible to add additional mappings at runtime, and it appears that under the hood, nscgi also uses the Ns_RegisterRequest C API which is supposed to be safe to execute at runtime. So, I added a new Tcl command, ns_register_cgi, which is now part of nscgi. It is just a wrapper around CgiRegister, and thus takes the same argument.
For example, if you wanted to map all requests to “/foo” (including “/foo/bar“) to a PHP script “/var/www/myfoo.php“, you would use something like this:
foreach method {GET POST HEAD} {
ns_register_cgi "$method /foo /var/www/myfoo.php"
}
This maps GET, POST and HEAD requests to URLs starting with “/foo” to the script specified.
Caveat: It is currently possible to load the nscgi module multiple times in the same AOLserver process, for each virtual server. It is also possible to load it multiple times for the same virtual server. I’m not sure why anyone would do that, but it’s possible. In that circumstance, the behavior of ns_register_cgi is undefined–as in, I haven’t tested it. It may or may not work correctly. If you run such a configuration, where nscgi is loaded multiple times in the same virtual server, please test this carefully and share your findings. Thanks.
I’ve commited the changes to SourceForge CVS, both in HEAD (rev 1.33, diff) and the aolserver_v40_bp branch (rev 1.23.2.4, diff).
For Giftmas 2007, we adopted two cats–a brother and sister pair, originally named Pumpkin (boy) and Ashes (girl). We’ve attached additional names to them, namely Tiger for Pumpkin and Fudgebar for Ashes.
My wife did all the work of finding the cats and adopting them and without all her hard work and effort, nothing would get done around here. She also snapped off a few awesome pictures of the cats after they adjusted to the house a bit.
Here’s two pictures that she took of them that I got around to uploading:
Tags: cats
After living with 384 Kbps SDSL for the past eight years, first with NorthPoint until they went out of business (1999–2001), then with Eclipse Internet Access (2001–2003) who was acquired by NetCarrier in early 2001, then to DSL.net who I’m still with today. Each time, I’ve been stuck with only 384 Kbps SDSL because every time we’ve moved, we’ve picked locations that are close to the end of the DSL physical limit–roughly 10,000-15,000 ft. from the telco.
The last time we moved back in 2001, I tried ordering Cablevision/Optimum Online. They gave me an install window of “sometime between 8 AM and 2 PM” which was pretty ridiculous, but whatever. By 1:30 PM, when no one showed up, we called to get a status update. We were told that they would contact the technician and get back to us within 30 minutes. At 2:00 PM, we hadn’t heard back so we called again to be told that they were on their way. By 3:00 PM, we had enough waiting and had other things to do that day, so we called back and cancelled the installation order. We left the house and did what we needed to do and came back around 4:00 PM. At 4:30 PM, the installer rolls up and I met him outside to ask, “Didn’t anyone tell you the install order was cancelled over an hour and a half ago? You realize our install was scheduled for before 2 PM.” He shook his head “no,” and I sent him away. The guy showed up in a pickup truck without a ladder or a bucket truck, which was necessary for our install anyway–how was he even going to complete the install even if he did arrive on time? We subsequently ordered DirecTV satellite for our TV service and I ordered the SDSL, and that was that.
So, we put up with our slow SDSL for so long because it has been really stable–I’d say close to 99.99% uptime or less than one hour of downtime per year! It was also business-level service with static IPs and I could host my own servers off the link as part of the agreement. Other than the speed, I was and still am very happy with the service. But, it would be nice to get more bandwidth, so I reconsidered doing cable broadband. Things couldn’t be as bad as they were 8 years ago, could they?
Fast-forward to last week, January 16th, to our Cablevision install date. I ordered Optimum Online for business with Boost and Static IP. The install window this time was “sometime between 11 AM and 2 PM.” Again, at 1:30 PM, there was no installer in sight, so I called to ask for status. I was called back and told that he was running late. He finally showed up close to 3:00 PM, but at least he had come with a ladder to get up the pole and do the outside wiring required. Around 5:30 PM, he’d completed the installation and everything was up and running. Not the greatest experience, but this time I at least had low enough expectations that unless they didn’t show up at all on the day of the install date, I wasn’t too bothered.
Over the next few days, I’d cut over DNS and mail and web over to the new static IP range I was assigned. After two days, the old DSL link went quiet indicating all changes had propagated. I’d set up bandwidth accounting to get an idea of how well the new cable link was doing. Here’s a snapshot of the graph from a recent time period:
(click to enlarge)
The link is advertised as being close to 30 Mbps down and 5 Mbps up, and as you can see, the max the link saw over the past 12 hours in that graph was 24 Mbps down and 1.23 Mbps up–fantastic throughput, for sure. My laptop, connected to my network via wireless 802.11g at 54 Mbps, seems to get 5.0 Mbps down and 4.6 Mbps up using Cablevision’s SpeedCheck. Those numbers are a bit misleading as they only reflect speeds over your cable modem into their network–speed tests to sites on the open Internet come out noticably lower, probably due to Cablevision’s peering speeds or some other rate limiting or traffic shaping they have in place, would be my guess. Still, this is a far cry better than the 384 Kbps SDSL, right?
One thing I noticed about cable is the incredible amount of ARP chatter that comes down the pipe. My guess is there isn’t enough to materially affect the amount of available remaining bandwidth, but it’s interesting to see that kind of leakage. Another thing is the latency: on the SDSL link, latency was almost always ~20 ms, whereas on the cable link it fluctuates between ~20ms to as high as ~80 ms at times. While this probably isn’t noticed by your typical customer, I wonder how much jitter it causes on realtime applications such as VoIP or interactive SSH sessions. I guess I’ll just have to see.
All in all, I’m happy with the new cable link and will likely be shutting down the SDSL or keeping it as a backup if DSL.net will make me a great deal as it’s quite costly (around $130/month). Relying completely on the cable link makes me extremely uncomfortable, but the cost saving and additional bandwidth certainly makes it attractive. We’ll see how reliable this link over the next few months, as I’ve got the link monitored and bandwidth accounting set up, etc.
Tags: DSL, Cablevision, Optimum Online
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After yesterday’s yawner of a Macworld Expo, I wasn’t really expecting today to yield much interesting news. Of course, I wake up to the news that Sun acquired MySQL! Both Jonathan Schwartz and Kaj Arnö share with us some of the best-laid plans of mice and men.
My first reaction was most definitely “WTF?!?” After the initial shock subsided, I wondered if it was April already. Checking my calendar, I realized it wasn’t. Ah, maybe I’m still sleeping and this is just a really lucid dream? Nope. Okay, so how do I get from “denial” to “acceptance” as quickly as possible?
Sure, the next phase set in quick: anger. How dare they do this? First, Sun gives up the legacy of their SUNW ticker symbol in exchange for JAVA. Now they’re going after my beloved MySQL database? Please don’t tell me the next press release to come out is the announcement of a renamed MySQL into some craptastic “Sun Enterprise Data Management Suite,” codenamed “Monkeybutter.”
Fine, I’m being completely irrational, I know it. Things can’t get that bad, that quickly, right? I mean, if we’re all supportive and positive, things will just keep getting better for both Sun and MySQL, right? I mean, Sun infusing more money into MySQL will inevitably make it a better product, right? Just let some good come out of this situation, please?
Oh, what’s the use? Companies are struggling so hard to find MySQL talent, and it’s allegedly “the world’s most popular open source database” according to MySQL itself. Sun bet the farm on Java and subsequently we’ve watched the company fall into the pit of irrelevancy. Who really cares what happens to either of these companies any more?
You know who? I do. I love Sun hardware and I love using MySQL databases. If there’s some benefit to be had here, I’m sure Jonathan Schwartz will find it and exploit it to the benefit of his customers. In any business, if I had to bet on someone, I’ll always pick the guy with the pony-tail and T-shirt to win. If you’ve ever seen me in person, you’ll know exactly why. :-)
Last March, I had nothing but great things to say about BlogJet 2.0. It’s still a great blogging tool for the Windows platform–that is, if it were still March 2007. It’s January 2008 now, ten months later, and the fact that there hasn’t been any real bug fixes or improvements in all that time, really sucks.
Today, I finally narrowed down the simplest test case for a HTML generation bug in BlogJet that has been annoying me since I bought this software. I just posted a message about it in the “troubleshooting” forum, but in case you don’t check the forum, I’m repeating it here.
I’m using BlogJet 2.0.0.10 on WinXP Home SP2 and IE6. (No, I haven’t upgraded to IE7, yet.) Here are the steps to reproduce:
This is “a simple test.”
http://test/?foo=bar&baz=bing
What you get is:
This is "<A href="http://test/?foo="bar&baz=bing"">a simple test</a>".
That is wrong. What it should have been is:
This is "<A href="http://test/?foo=bar&baz=bing">a simple test</a>".
Where did the extra pair of double quotes come from? (e.g., around “bar&baz=bing“)?
This might not seem like a big deal, but if you find yourself linking to phrases within double quotes and the link destination contains query parameters, this bug is going to bite you.
Please, someone, develop an open source replacement to BlogJet in 2008 and let me know about it. Hell, I’ll even help develop it …
As much as people wonder “who still uses Tcl?” or “what the heck is Tcl?” … it’s still alive and well and under steady new development. The long-awaited release of Tcl 8.5 happened this past December 20, 2007. You can download it from here.
The discussion on Slashdot about it shows that there’s still a lot of misinformation and outright FUD being spread about Tcl, now 20 years old. Of course, the Tcl community seems to focus more on excellence in engineering than evangelism and PR, so Tcl will likely remain “a well-kept secret, sitting out in plain sight” for the next 20 years.
For people who are already familiar with Tcl but would like to know what significant changes were introduced in Tcl 8.5, Michael Cleverly has a fantastic write-up on it. I highly recommend reading what he wrote if you’re looking to take advantage of Tcl 8.5’s new features.
Tags: Tcl
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