At some point last year, I decided that it was time to retire my old school WRT54GL and jump on the 802.11n band wagon. My media PC is a floor away from my file server and wireless is the best option. The thing with WRT54GL series though, it that it’s incredibly rock solid, especially compared to all the other consumer grade routers that suck. After brief research and on advice from Jeff Atwood I settled on Buffalo WZR-HP-G300NH.
After purchasing the router, I ended up removing the stock firmware and installing an appropriate version of DD-WRT. After a few months the router would stop responding to any wireless traffic while still broadcasting it’s SSID. It’s such a well known problem that there are two “fixes“ for it on the DD-WRT wiki. Basically, the solution is to restart the router every single day.
My attempt at fixing this problem was to blow away the DD-WRT and install Buffalo’s “professional firmware”1which is simply a rebranded and possibly forked version of DD-WRT. I installed it about two weeks ago. The result? The router now drops absolutely ALL wifi every 2 to 3 days. 3 times the improvement!
Bottom line, the router is nowhere near as reliable as the old WRT54 and I don’t recommend it.
Buffalo designates this firmware as “Alpha”, but the router is over a year old… ?
It seems like this book is everywhere. I succumbed to the pressure and listened to the audio book version from Audible. The narration by Simon Vance was really good. The story itself it’s quite gripping but surprisingly, I found myself enjoying small details about Sweden. I think the last (and only) swedish book I read was by Astrid Lindgren, Karlson on the roof, a popular children’s book in Russia. Anyhow, “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo”, is a mystery-thriller type setup which I haven’t read in a while. There’s a swedish film as well as a hollywood one both of which I’m planning to check out. Stieg Larsson has two more books in the “Millenium Series” that I’ll consider reading.
Apparently while I was away ignoring Cocos2d they’ve gone and made a Mac port. So it’s somewhat simple to port an iOS game on to Mac. First screenshot, clearly there’s some work to be done still:
Interesting quotes below but the whole post is worth reading:
Heavily built, fed at the earliest age with Gatorade, proteins and creatine (Heh. More like Waffle House and McDonalds) – they are all heads and shoulders taller than us and their muscles remind us of Rambo. Our frames are amusingly skinny to them – we are wimps, even the strongest of us
And combat ? If you have seen Rambo you have seen it all – always coming to the rescue when one of our teams gets in trouble, and always in the shortest delay. That is one of their tricks : they switch from T-shirt and sandals to combat ready in three minutes. Arriving in contact with the enemy, the way they fight is simple and disconcerting : they just charge ! They disembark and assault in stride, they bomb first and ask questions later – which cuts any pussyfooting short.
The American soldier and Marine, however, are imbued from early in their training with the ethos: In the Absence of Orders: Attack! Where other forces, for good or ill, will wait for precise orders and plans to respond to an attack or any other ‘incident’, the American force will simply go, counting on firepower and SOP to carry the day.
This is one of the great strengths of the American force in combat and it is something that even our closest allies, such as the Brits and Aussies (that latter being closer by the way) find repeatedly surprising. No wonder is surprises the hell out of our enemies.
Current everyday conventional boring ‘leg infantry’ units exceed the PT levels and training levels of most Special Forces during the Vietnam War. They exceed both of those as well as IQ and educational levels of: Waffen SS, WWII Rangers, WWII Airborne and British ‘Commando’ units during WWII. Their per-unit combat-functionality is essentially unmeasurable because it has to be compared to something and there’s nothing comparable in industrial period combat history.
This group is so much better than ‘The Greatest Generation’ at war that WWII vets who really get a close look at how good these kids are stand in absolute awe.
I’ve never heard about Louis CK until I watched his show Louie. Below is a clip from one of the episodes. Louie wakes up after a night of hardcore partying and:
That’s how I feel most days. I tried to find a clip from another episode, Subway/Pamela but no go. You’re gonna have to trust me that it’s another great episode.
What makes it so interesting to watch is the fact that in 1988 computerized special effects weren’t in full swing yet, so James Cameron actually filmed a lot of the movie underwater. The sets they built were quite amazing too, because they were built in an abandoned nuclear containment vessel:
After they finished the movie, they just left the set there. It’s still visible on Google Maps.
And since we’re talking about movies about movies, check out Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse about Apocalypse Now. Incredible documentary about an incredible movie. It was so intense, Martin Sheen had a heart attack. I can’t find the whole thing online, but here’s a taste on youtube:
Today’s Cool Tool is a book about napping. Check it out. The image below is apparently from the book. Add up the suggested sleep time and nap time and you end up with 10 hours. I want this book already.
State Route 20 in Washington is closed every winter due to significant amounts of snow and heightened avalanche danger. It’s WSDOT‘s job to take care of this, and turns out they use real life 105mm howitzers to blast at avalanche chutes, to clear them up! The album of road crews cleaning up the snow is pretty interesting. WSDOT’s flickr photostream is quite extensive, I’m sure there’s more interesting stuff in there.
SR20, otherwise known as the North Cascades Highway is how you get here: . This is a view from Slate Peak lookout, at 7400 feet, the highest point in Washington that can be driven to. The directions are here.
I’ve discovered a reading list from a couple of years ago. Short notes, in no particular order, below:
A Year in Provence by Peter Mayle. Lengthy descriptions of french food and “quaint” towns. I didn’t learn much from this book and nothing has really staid with me. Skip.
A Matter for Men, A Day for Damnation , A Rage for Revenge, A Season for Slaughter by David Gerrold. All part of the War Against Chtorr series. An amazing work, both in depth and breadth. Describes a lengthy war between humans and alien bio-organisms. The author actually worked with a biologist so this is definitely hard scifi. Recommended.
Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand. A rather famous tome, mostly for pushing it’s authors philosophy of Objectivism. It took me a while to read this, and while I’m glad that I did, I’m not sure that I’d subject anyone else to this. Rand’s philosophy is seductive in many ways and I was quite taken with it in the beginning. After examining it for a couple of years I find that it has major flaws.. I take the fact that the book is still being talked about so long after the author’s death to mean that maybe there’s something there. It’s over a 1,000 pages of rather difficult prose. Like I said, I’m on the fence about recommending it or not.
The Atrocity Archives and The Jennifer Morgue by Charles Stross. Humorous and entertaining series of novels set in “our time”, with elements of magic, daemon summoning nazis and so on. Fun.
The Dresden Files by Jim Butcher. I was not aware that the TV show was based on the book. When I started reading I couldn’t stop. The books are light and entertaining, all about a wizard with a conscience living and practicing his craft in Chicago in “our days”. Good fun. Recommended, if you’re a fan of “city fantasy”.
Dark Tower by Stephen King. I couldn’t stop reading this series as well, King creates an amazing twisted universe. I had to pause for a few days before I started the last book… and managed to break free. The last book is sitting on my shelf mocking me. His books are a blend of scifi, fantasy and horror and quite entertaining.
Jumper and Reflex by Steven Gould. Most people are familiar with the movie but it turns out that it was based on a book. I enjoyed the movie, and when I found that there’s an associated (and preceding the movie) series of books I couldn’t pass it up. The books don’t disappoint. Teleportation would be sweet.
American Gods by Neil Gaiman. Quite complex. In a fight between the old Gods and the new Gods, who will survive? Read it.
World War Z by Max Brooks. What if zombies were real? Up to now, zombie outbreaks were treated in a localized manner (Dawn of the Dead, 28 days later, etc). What would be a systemic response? How would governments handle an outbreak? What would the army do? How would the population survive? Brooks covers all of this and more, in the form of “interviews” with the surviving participants of the war. Very interesting. They are actually making a movie out of this. Recommended.
Daemon and Freedom by Daniel Suarez. Technothriller. A piece of news-reading software takes over the world and destroys greedy corporations. A fun read.
Repossession Mambo by Eric Garcia.
Another case of movie before the book for me. Briefly, the main character is employed by the people that make artificial organs. When people are unable to pay for their artiforgs, it’s his job to repossess said organs. While the movie is centred on the action, the book takes it’s time to describe what’s going through the persons head while he’s cutting an artificial heart or lungs out of a “client”. The book is definitely better than the movie. Worth a read.
Fair use allows any individual to cite a portion of a copyrighted work. Lets assume that there are N individuals all quoting a copyrighted book. All of these individuals are quoting unique portions of the book. If we assemble all of the text fragments, we essentially reconstitute a book. Now say there’s an index of all of the fragments. A piece of software could assemble a book essentially on the fly, without ever having the whole work (or even a large portion of the work) stored locally on the user’s computer. Does this scheme still constitute fair use?
To review:
There are N pieces of text, individually being fair use.
There’s an index somewhere that orders the text segments properly. This meta information is fair use as well.
There’s a program that knows how to traverse this “distributed book”. This should be fair use as well, if we only display a small fraction of the book at a time.
This could be organized as a P2P cloud. It’d be difficult to point fingers at anyone because technically there would be no copyright infringement.
This could be abstracted to any type of data (movies, music, etc). Technically, BitTorrent protocol already does this. Except it stores the complete copy locally. Like I said, mental exercise.
