Dossy's Blog

As I try to get some work done waiting for car repairs, I discovered that the ETD on Route 23 in Kinnelon, NJ, has Optimum WiFi within range. Being a Optimum Online customer, I get free access to it.

My initial opinion of this particular hotspot is really unpredictable latency and packet loss. Speedtest.net results:

It’s not bad – I’m posting this blog entry from the connection – but the latency and packet loss makes interactive sessions like SSH really painful. Still, it’s usable to get some work done – email, web browsing, etc.

Tags: Optimum WiFi, Kinnelon, NJ

I’m doing a bunch of electrical clean-up in the house and have a bunch of scrap vintage BX cable and boxes and switches – I’d hate to just throw these out in the recycling if they’re still worth something, to somebody.

It appears that the going rate for copper/steel BX scrap is around $0.20/pound and I probably only have 20-30 pounds of scrap so far, so it’s really not worth the aggravation of finding a scrap buyer.

Should I just dump this in the recycling bin? Anyone have better ideas?

In order to get afacli working on Ubuntu Hardy, I did these things:

1. Get afa-apps-snmp.2807420-A04.tar.gz from Dell.

2. Get libstdc++2.10-glibc2.2 from Debian afacli depends on libstdc++-libc6.2-2.so.3.

Since I’m running Ubuntu x86_64, I put libstdc++-libc6.2-2.so.3 in /usr/lib32. Installing the rpm package under Ubuntu provides rpm2cpio which I used to extract afaapps-4.1-0.i386.rpm like this:

$ rpm2cpio afaapps-4.1-0.i386.rpm | (cd / && cpio -iudvm)

That’s it. You now have /usr/sbin/afacli.

Tags: Linux, Ubuntu, Adaptec, afacli

Last week, I wrote that Wolfram Alpha still couldn’t answer such important (ha) questions such as “How is babby formed?“

As you might expect, Wolfram Alpha’s gotten smarter already. Look:

That’s what I call awesome. Well done, guys.

Wolfram Alpha may be cool, but it can’t answer the really important questions, yet, such as “How is babby formed?” …