Let's_burn_tony_orlando's_house

title: Let's Burn Tony Orlando's House date: 2006-05-01 05:52:30

Spent some time this weekend trying to get wireless working. I've got the WRT54G on the second floor, and my wife's iBook on the first. The iBook will pick up the signal more or less fine, but if you put it to sleep and come back in an hour (say), it won't find the signal anymore. I suspect it's the iBook's fault, but I can't be sure since I haven't got another wireless notebook to check it with.

As I mentioned, the signal the iBook gets is decent, but it surprises me how much depends on the orientation of the antennae -- which, on the iBook, means what angle you've got the monitor at. I built a couple of these antennas, and that does seem to help a bit. Plus it's just fun making something with cardboard and tape and aluminum foil...feels like I'm in grade one again. :-)

On Friday I had to set up a new Windows workstation for the first time in a while, and I remembered these guys. They've done a metric buttload of work since I last checked in with them (Lord, a year now?) We use this program at work to automate software installs on Windows machines, and even though we had problems setting it up (mainly getting it to run as a service using Cygwin's cygrunsrv) it's saved us a ton of time getting new workstations ready. I think it's time I took another look at using it for ongoing maintenance, rather than just first installs.

Slowly getting my OpenBSD firewall put together. It'd be cool to use the WRT, of course, but then I wouldn't get to use the 3.9 CD set I just bought. It still amazes me that I can put together a firewall using pf and not lock myself out.

Marcin posted recently that he got Linux working on his own WRT1133 clone. Rather than bother uploading an image to flash, though, he used OpenOCD to write the image to memory using a JTAG cable. I hadn't heard of OpenOCD before, and this raises the possibility of getting Flash writes working from Linux by watching what the original bootloader does when it loads another image.

My father has started a blog. I was going to write, "Now if only my uncle would post again...", but he beat me to it.

Oh, and the favicon comes courtesy of Chris. Many thanks!

Finally, my friend ZenRender has just got a haircut after, like, at least eleven years of rampant hippiedom. (He did get it partly cut last year, but I call that chickening out.) Of course, he still looks like a damned Communist.