Boots With DeFer

Wireless Networking Stuff

2010-07-18T18:06:10-05:00

I've been playing around with some wireless networking stuff lately. Small projects and digging through my collection of gear.

I added an external RP-SMA port to my netbook, bought a pigtail from Jefa Tech and mounted the jack where the Kensington lock would go. Took a bit of work and some dremelling, but it works and doesn't look too bad. I also put a new pigtail on my old 2.4ghz omni antenna with an RP-SMA instead of the goofy connector I used to use with the Orinoco card. Unfortunately it doesn't seem to make any difference to the signal received, I'm not sure why. I suppose I'll have to test range, though it definitely doesn't see any more APs around here (of which there are a lot). The antenna on my old setup had rather amazing range, I recall seeing a signal 5 miles away once.

I've also been playing with the pair of RouterBOARD 411 wireless setups I have. They're long range point to point rigs with high gain panel antennas, out door enclosures and mounts, POE, the whole 9 yards. Pretty nice gear but I don't really have a use for them. They don't have the license to be an AP so I can't use them for that, though the level 4 license is pretty cheap I'll probably just leave them as-is. I did upgrade them to the RouterOS 4.10 and reset them to default config so they're ready to go if I find a use for the ...

Ice Fishing

2010-07-15T17:14:29-05:00

...

Diyala Offensive in Newsweek

2010-06-13T17:36:58-05:00

Found the articles that were written out us when we were on a mission in Iraq: Diyala Offensive Part One: A Whole Lot of Gray and Diyala Offensive Part Two: The Ghosts in the Canals ...

Mount Union

2010-05-31T00:01:04-05:00

...

Sunrise Peak

2010-04-25T09:00:40-05:00

...

One Eventful Day

2010-04-21T00:48:09-05:00

So today was full of happenings.

Went to English in the morning, it was as entertaining as usual, nothing special there. Went to lunch at Rosita's with Colleen, who had contact me on one of the dating sites I used to use. Since I so rarely get responses from those sites I always make a point to pay special attention to the ones who make first contact. She works just a few miles from me, though she lives in Peoria. Will have to see how that develops.

The big event came when I was on my way to my Architecture class. I wiped out on my bike, the loose front forks finally gave up the ghost and I went flying. Got my bell rung pretty good, cracked my helmet and had to sit there for about 10 minutes before the stars went away. Banged up my left shoulder and arm, some road rash but not horrible but the shoulder is going to be really painful in the morning, I can already tell.

This evening I went to the ASU vs UofA baseball game at Packard Stadium with Uncle Mark and Carl. ASU lost despite being the best team in the country with a record of 31-3 (now 31-4 I suppose). Still had a pretty good time, took some pictures which I haven't looked at yet with the 300mm. It's definitely not a good sports lens (f/4 is too slow), at least not for nighttime but I may salvage a few pictures out of i ...

Peralta Trail

2010-04-18T09:00:05-05:00

...

Pine Creek Loop 2

2010-04-11T21:00:12-05:00

...

Papago Park w/Shannon

2010-04-10T20:00:47-05:00

...

Camelback Cholla Trail w/Shannon

2010-04-09T17:00:46-05:00

...

Papago Park w/Erin

2010-04-07T20:00:37-05:00

...

Pine Creek Loop

2010-04-03T21:00:23-05:00

...

Sunrise Peak Trail 2

2010-03-27T21:00:28-05:00

...

Spring Break

2010-03-22T10:00:28-05:00

Not much to say about spring break, really. I went to the Renaissance Festival and did a lot of hiking. That and homework, Calculus mostly, I have the mastery exam on the 25th. I need to process and upload a whole lot of photos, I haven't done it since around Christmas!

Trails hiked:
Sunrise Trail
Boulder Canyon
Black Mountain
Pinnacle Peak
The usual trails around where I li ...

Pinnacle Peak

2010-03-21T21:00:37-05:00

...

Black Mountain

2010-03-20T21:00:27-05:00

...

Boulder Canyon Trail

2010-03-18T21:00:05-05:00

...

Sunrise Peak Trail

2010-03-13T09:00:12-06:00

...

Quartz Ridge Trail

2010-02-27T09:00:54-06:00

...

Hiking

2010-02-21T16:45:58-06:00

Went hiking with a group I found on Meetup and had a pretty good time. We got started late because the group founder slept late, and the rain cut the hike short but we made it about halfway. Afterwards we went to Salty Senoritas for Josh (the founder's) birthday party and lunch. Met some interesting people and look forward to doing it agai ...

Bicycle Accident

2010-02-18T09:49:58-06:00

I was riding to school this morning and ran into a girl running across the street. I was turning to avoid her but she stopped suddenly and I nailed her. I flew off my bike and landed on my back, got a few scratches and my wrist is a little sore. She was unhurt, but unfortunately had a full coffee so now I'm sitting in my English class covered in sugary coffe ...

On the cruelty of really teaching computer science

2010-02-05T13:13:29-06:00

My computer science course (CSE-101) is so basic, and driving me rather nuts. Our 'programming' consists of using a graphical programming environment called ALICE. It reminds me of a paper by the famous computer scientist E.W. Dijkstra (whose work resulted in a number of routing protocols based on the shortest path first algorithm he developed).

Here is an excerpt (emphasis mine):

"Not everybody understands this sufficiently well. I was recently exposed to a demonstration of what was pretended to be educational software for an introductory programming course. With its "visualizations" on the screen it was such an obvious case of curriculum infantilization that its author should be cited for "contempt" of the student body", but this was only a minor offense compared with what the visualizations were used for: they were used to display all sorts of features of computations evolving under control of the student's program! The system highlighted precisely what the student has to learn to ignore, it reinforced precisely what the student has to unlearn. Since breaking out of bad habits, rather than acquiring new ones, is the toughest part of learning, we must expect from that system permanent mental damage for most students exposed to it." -- E.W. Dijkstra (http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/transcriptions/EWD10xx/EWD1036.html) ...

All Good Things...

2010-01-16T15:06:32-06:00

Just watched the last episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation for the first time since it originally aired. Possibly the greatest episode of Star Trek ever made. It's got a great story and brings back some characters we hadn't seen in a while (Tasha, Q). This is what Star Trek is about folks, when did they lose tha ...

Acer Aspire 1410

2010-01-14T23:39:43-06:00

I bought an Acer Aspire 1410 Netbook for school use, it's small, good battery, and fairly speedy. Core 2 Solo SU3500 (1.4ghz), 2GB memory, 250GB HD, Win7 Home Premium, all for $420. It's got Intel integrated graphics but it manages to play EVE which kinda surprised me. That's not what it's for though and should serve me very well in clas ...

Asterisk, OpenSolaris, and the Motorola VST200

2009-12-24T16:50:49-06:00

I finally got my old Motorola VST200 cordless phone working with Asterisk and successfully made a VoIP call with it! This phone is a classic, it looks like an ancient cellular phone and even flips open but it's a regular PSTN cordless phone. There were many moving pieces here, first I had to find a new battery for it which I did some weeks ago. I had a Digium TDM400P from years ago when I was last playing with Asterisk that I had to get working on OpenSolaris, as I no longer run Linux. Fortunately the guys at Solaris VoIP had a port of the Zaptel drivers. Unfortunately the newer Asterisks use DAHDi instead of Zaptel and nobody has ported that and I didn't want to play with it to see if there were more than name changes. So I just used Asterisk 1.2 which isn't a big deal for something that I'll probably never use. After much fiddling I finally got it working. What to do with it though?
...