Thurgoona residents slam Optus tower

Both parties pleaded their case to councillors last night in their scrap over Optus’ plans to build a 25-metre mobile phone tower on Thurgoona Golf Course

The Thurgoona residents, who claim the phone tower is a visual blight that will affect the value of their homes, were last night furious with Optus for refusing to reveal statistics showing a need for the new tower.

Good luck getting a mast on every street corner for a nationwide high speed network.

A few weeks ago our ADSL router / modem / wireless access point started misbehaving, regularly dropping our internet connections at inconvenient times (side note, you haven’t heard swearing until you’ve heard Mrsdave’s game of Battlefield: Bad Company interrupted by a network outage) requiring it to be replaced quickly.

I had been waiting for an opportunity to replace the last router, although it did 90% of things quite well, the last 10% was often an exercise in frustration. My ultimate goal is to build an OpenBSD based router, using a Soekris embedded computer, so I chose to replace the all in one unit with a Linksys AM300 ADSL modem and a Linksys WRT54G2 router / access point.

I had used Linksys equipment in the past and found it, for a consumer level product, to be quite reliable, with a good range of features. Since Linksys had been purchased by Cisco, the de-facto standard when it comes to networking, I figured that their gear could only have improved. That assumption was not entirely correct.

Initial attempts to configure the modem and router were stymied by the lack of useful documentation and the awful configuration ‘helper’ software. Considering these two products came from the same vendor, getting them to play nice was much harder than it should have been. Eventually I had to fully set up the modem as a router and then switch it to Half Bridge, thereby negating the router part of the setup, before connecting the WRT54G2 before anything would work.

After finally getting on-line things seemed to be getting better, wireless range and performance was good, the WRT54G2 feature set was more to my liking than the D-Link that it replaced and our downloads were coming down at a good rate. The whole exercise seemed to be a success until Mrsdave and I tried to jump online for a quick blast of Battlefield, only one Xbox could log on to Xbox Live at a time. This would not do. It seemed that there was some problem with the UPnP implementation on this router, a firmware update didn’t help and neither did trying to place one of the Xboxes in a DMZ.

Perhaps foolishly, I thought that Linksys support would be able to help me. I used the “Live Chat” link on Linksys’ Australian website, but it routed me to European support personnel who were determined not to help me. Some excerpts of my interactions are below.

Ryan (30044E): Thank you for the information, however, I am afraid you seem to have contacted the EMEA (Europe, Middle East and Africa) support.
Dave from Albury: I selected live chat from the Australian page – I guess it just finds whoever is available [05:02:17 AM]
Dave from Albury: All I want is some help with my router [05:05:26 AM]
Ryan (30044E): The support region is differnet. [05:10:47 AM]
Dave from Albury: I’m pretty sure that TCP/IP is fairly uniform though [05:07:00 AM]
Ryan (30044E): But you have been misrouted to the EMEA support. [05:13:18 AM]
Dave from Albury: That doesn’t really worry me – all I want is some help with my router [05:09:22 AM]
Dave from Albury: What’s the point of having follow the sun support if you refuse to answer people’s questions? [05:12:55 AM]
Dave from Albury: Ryan, we have a simple situation here. I am a customer, you are a customer support rep. How about you just give me some support [05:17:41 AM]
Dave from Albury: ? [05:17:43 AM]
Ryan (30044E): Sir the configurations for each region are different. [05:24:50 AM]
Dave from Albury: it’s TCP/IP, it’s the same world wide, it runs this thing called the internet. [05:21:36 AM]

Defeated, I re-installed the old D-Link, which mercifully seemed to be have abandoned the more random elements of its behaviour.

The Linksys gear sat unused for a few weeks until I remembered the DD-WRT project, which provides alternative firmware for some Linksys routers. Luckily my model is supported, so this week I embarked on the project of updating to the DD-WRT firmware. It’s not a straight forward process, the WRT54G2 has to be flashed using TFTP, but only responds for about a 2 second window at boot time. After a few attempts to flash the router, and worrying that it had been bricked more than once, the initial image finally took. From there on in it got easier, the subsequent images loaded easily and the configuration was simple to do.

The acid test came this afternoon when we fired up the Xboxes, would the UPnP code in this open source project be better than the professionals at Cisco? In a word, yes. The DD-WRT firmware plays nice with Xbox Live, restoring peace and happiness to the Dave from Albury Compound.

In addition, when I do finally get around so building that OpenBSD firewall, DD-WRT offers many more features as a basic wireless access point than the Linksys firmware does, so that’s a win too.

The thought that goes into packaging Apple products is amazing, it’s something that other manufacturers should take more time with.

I love the keyboard on this laptop, it reminds me of the Apple IIc that I spent hours using at school.

Apple stickers.

A sense of nerd completeness.

Update: These next photos are more ‘porn’ for Scott.

Accessories have arrived today. A Foofbag MacBook case and two cable turtles.

And check out those ports. Mmmm, FireWire 400, there are so many peripherals that will plug in there.

Sadly for me, a few months ago my much loved PowerBook G4 had a gravity related failure. I was able to restore a backup to a Mac Mini which I had not long borrowed from my little sister, which meant that I still had everything in the configuration that I’m used to, but it meant that I had to sacrifice portability.

The first thing I tried to do to free myself from my desk in the hut was to supplement the Mac Mini with Mrsdave’s old iBook. Although seven years old, the iBook is still in working order, however the rigours of web 2.0 just about kill it. I then dragged out my superseded work laptop, `a five year old Compaq, and installed Ubuntu on it. Ubuntu was fast and had all of the options that I wanted, but would not  connect to the wireless router in the house unless I downgraded the security settings. That was a deal breaker, so I begrudgingly installed Windows XP again.

I use XP at work, and even with a number of helper applications to fill in the gaps I still find using it a pain in comparison to OS X. I set about installing all of the utilities and software packages that I wanted on the old Compaq, but I had to find some extra ones to do things that my work laptop doesn’t get used for. On OS X I use a program called MarsEdit, which is an offline blogging editor, it’s much better than using the WordPress online editor, much like using a real mail client is always better than webmail. I’d never looked for a Windows equivalent to MarsEdit before as my work laptop is never used for personal stuff, but it didn’t take me long to find Windows Live Writer.

I love it. It’s a great piece of software. All of the things that take heaps of configuration to get working on MarsEdit work automatically on Live Writer, it has basic photo editing built in and a bunch of other nice little features too. I don’t know how on earth Microsoft managed to make a piece of software this good, I’m assuming that they bought out another developer, but I cannot find a bad thing to say about it. Apple needs to release a piece of software just like this.

I feel dirty. I think I need to take a shower.

“What’s stupid about that?” I hear you thinking, “surely removing the need to run speaker wires from your amp to your speakers is a great idea?”. Well, it might be, if it weren’t for the fact that speakers need electrical current to make the cones move and produce sound, meaning that each of these speakers has a power cable hanging out of it. Not particularly bloody wireless now is it?

So, instead of having to route a relatively thin wire across a room, which you can do yourself and easily conceal with little more effort than drilling a few holes, you need to have a 240 volt power socket available within a short distance of where you place your speakers. And this is before you even begin to look into the other down sides of these ‘wireless’ speakers like the potential for Radio Frequency interference, or the fact that you’ve just increased the complexity of the device, meaning there’s more stuff to go wrong or break.

What type of marketing half-wit was allowed to get this product to market? Who were the wood ducks who looked past the big bloody power cord and decided to buy these ‘wireless’ speakers? How hard did the sparky laugh when he sent the bill to these people for the installation of the power points for each of their speakers? To be fair, I guess you could avoid putting in power points by running an extension cord to each of the wireless speakers…….

I am more convinced every day that consumerism will kill us.

I’ll be up at seven, trying to find more success on medium, I hope that sobriety may improve my Guitar Hero performance.

It turns out that a Texan District Attorney used funds from his office to build a ‘backup server’ which bore a striking resemblance to a fully pimped out gaming rig. I’ll let the story speak for itself.

The computer – equipped with two hard drives, seven fans, high-end video and audio cards, a wireless Internet connection and cables that glow under ultraviolet light – is designed for playing video games, prosecutors say.

Alan Timberlake, assistant director of information technology for Rockwall County, called the computer “gimmicky” and more suited to a college dorm room than an office.

Rod Gregg, an FBI senior forensic examiner, said 80 percent of the content he found on the computer appeared to be personal rather than work-related.

“I would not configure a backup computer in that way,” Mr. Gregg said.

Thank you for that searing insight Special Agent Obvious. I love the fact that they need an expert witness for this case, but perhaps rather than an FBI forensic examiner they should have sought the opinion of a sixteen year old Counter Strike player.

Take a look at the PA comic about this here. I’ll be available to provide translations and explanations of the cultural references later in the comments.

“It’s empty” he observed, “Dad, where does the rubbish from that bin go?”

Why can’t my children be normal and ask questions about where babies come from?