Did I miss something?

There was so much noise about the LHC going online like 6 days ago. It didn't make sense to me... all they did on the 10th was to shine a light in one direction. The "problems" people talk about were actually when they slam the crap together... and according to WikiPedia that's not supposed to happen for another 6-8 weeks.

I'm no physicist... but even as sad as the media is about everything and can't be relied on for crap I would have expected at least one outlet says something about that.

Oh well.

It's Vista's fault, not HP!

So there's some new hardware from HP that Engadget's gotten their hands on tonight. I really liked their coverage, and agree with most of the gripes. *cough*glossy*cough*

The one thing that I wished had been at least tacitly mentioned was that the failings of the touch interface shouldn't be attributed solely to HP's work! They've probably done the best that can be with the software they're stuck with. Consumer's still need it to support Vista. This Linux Geek can live fine without it, but your average consumer can not.

There's been discussion before about HP acknowledging, maybe, that Vista's just not up to par when it comes to the touch interface for this new emerging technology. The hardware's arrived far ahead the software. That's true with a lot of things, when using vista. Using Sabayon GNU/Linux and KDE with compiz-fusion I've managed to put together a desktop that's far more appealing than Vista (visually, and technically... don't forget my personal FOSS biases.) and it runs far smoother, even with the weightier effects.

I haven't played with any of the touch interface work being done in the FOSS world but I'd put money, had I any, that I could reproduce the basic functionality at an improved performance.

Now, I would like to see more AMD offerings from HP, damn it. They did recently rev their 17" entertainment notebook in the AMD flavor... but I'm not seeing enough AMD Love. I probably pay a premium for my AMD-Love but it's worth it. They're the one's continuing to truly innovate and that's definitely worth supporting. Intel may be a great company but their focus is on shrinking the die and I just don't see the true innovation we get from AMD. I don't even price Intel machines, so I don't know how much I'm paying... and I just don't buy Intel.

I just hope HP keeps us AMD Loyalists in mind... they've done well so far. I still love my DV9000z and I think it's time for an upgrade. I'd damn near kill for a dv7z with the CPU and RAM ++'d like I did with the 9000z.

...a more open internet?

It would seem that Clearwire's made some changes to their traffic shaping policies in the last 24 hours. I'm sure that this happening hot on the heels of the FCC telling Comcast they had 30 days to fess up about their throttling.

Last night I was trying to download the Fedora install DVD's to research something... in a virtual machine, as I'm not moving away from Sabayon GNU/Linux, and all I could get was a SOLID 20K.

I then shut the machine off to let it dry as my woman spilled some extremely stinky dirty water on it... but I don't think any got inside. So after it dried overnight I fired the machine up and all is well... AND my Fedora torrents are getting anywhere from 120/200K/s which has _never_ happened with Clearwire.

If this change lasts, I'm happy.

screenshots

With ebola out of the pawnshop I decided now was as good a time as any to restore the factory vista install and then reinstall Sabayon GNU/Linux. That all went reasonably well. Only issue with SL 3.5 L3 was that the installer didn't give me the option for installing grub on /dev/sdb1 and /dev/sda. I needed to as my /boot is sdb1 and with the raid0 setup it's what was needed. Not a major issue once the install was finished and it just continued to boot direct to windows I just reboot in to System Rescue CD and added grub to the remaining location and we were dual-booting happily.

Anyhow so I only use Vista for playing Command and Conquer 3. So my I spend all my time in the linux playing with crap in Virtual Machines flashing routers and just being a geek. So yeah I spent a good day getting everything dialed in on the interface. Focus follows mouse. Found the smoothest cleanest animations for all the compiz settings. It all functions quite nicely on this laptop but since we do the dynamic CPU speed thing sometimes the animations speeds get flakey.... but the fade always looks nice and crisp so that's what a few of them are set to now.

Anyhow here's screenshots of just the look. With SL3.5L3 things work great. Ecstatic about how things are progressing over there. They're getting funding... and they've moved away from that god awful red/yellow branding and adopted a nice blue. That works for me because the laptop has blue led's so it encourages me to go with a blue theme too.

amateur astronomer finds new "green thing"

I guess the headline really sums this up. A dutch school teacher found an odd green thing. Posted it to Galaxy Zoo to ask what it was, and it turns out we don't know. Probably something knew. She called it a Voorwerp. "Thing" or "subject" maybe appropriate translations... but it's green... which makes me happy.

interesting

Clearwire & Sprint and everybody who's part of the new wimax venture that I think is actually being called "New Clearwire" (yeah that worked out great for new coke) but the idea actually has me intrigued. Any device, more or less. Any application, more or less.

Now, I've been a Clearwire user for just over a year. I was angrily disatisfied with the service when I first signed up. No torrent would go faster than 3K/s. Other downloads faired better. I'd get bursts of 300K/s... for maybe 5 minutes at a time. It would throttle down to a solid 90K/s. It stayed there I'd say 90% of the time.

I download Sabayon GNU/Linux DVD's everytime they release. Including all of their Beta "Loops". I have a modern laptop with 3d, hdmi, dvd dl, bluetooth all kinds of lil' gizmos. Everyone of them has worked out-of-the-box for 6 releases so far. But it's a lot of downloading every time there's a new release to try out. All legal, and well supported on BitTorrent to make the download as distributed and painless on everybody as is practicable.

I had originally written how things were currently still the same here in Clearwire land. It would seem, however, that things have changed drastically in the last week or two. I've been fairly busy with work and having a wife and two kids and what have you... and haven't really done any large downloads. There was, however, the release of Sabayon 3.5 Loop 3. So it's time to download a new DVD. So I started grabbing it while I wrote... all of this.

Things are getting better, it would seem. I know get the usual start-out and happy little bursts of 300K/s or so and there's still the usual 90K/s cap for most of the transfer. But it seems to, almost entirely randomly, jump on up to 150 or so for a bit. Often enough to keep it down to probably 8 hours for the DVD. A lot better than the last two or three I've downloaded since signin' up with Clearwire because I could use it today and I liked the idea of taking it school so I didn't have to use the College's wifi.

If this new performance is a sign of where the New Clearwire (Nuclearwire?) heading on the any device, any service, any content promise... then... man I'm sold and on board as long as BitTorrent starts behaving. Let the Copyright holders handle enforcement. They already have people contracted for that. I had questions about the company in the begining and didn't feel any happier when I saw Comcast in the list of people possibly involved in this deal.

But if they do it, amen. They did say lawful referring to the service and devices. I'm fine with that. I fully expect that this is the answer to all of our bitching about throttling and traffic shapping. They'll just be all out millitant about AUP inforcement. That'll definitely be a document to read real carefully before signing up.

Bandwidth caps would be annoying. I see a lot of ISP's going that way. Too many. If you sell me 6m, I get to use 6m. If I have a reason to generate or download as much traffic as I've paid to, I can do it... even if it's for every single second. I'm not going to, but that's what the connection is for. I'd make my 28.8K dedicated static PPP connection do for weeks on end back in the day. Downloading a new GNU/Linux distribution took days and days. Then there were those 3 or 4 boxes of floppies to dd.

Geek crap is data intensive. All my GNU/Linux work these days involves source, and patches, and git trees, and I mirror a lot of content locally for on the go stuff. Like project gutenberg and tons of docs stuff that needs to be kept up-to-date. It adds up.

But it's all perfectly legal and has a positive net impact on the internet community as a whole. Especially with GNU/Linux making such great in roads into the mainstream these days. The world is really starting to see the value of software built by people who care because they want it to work for them... and my testing helps and it would make my life easier.

... amen.

I just saw this video for Chamillionaire's Evening News on the back end of the video for Hip-Hop Police. I know the views here aren't new, and a lot of us agree... but I just really thought it was great. Never posted a video to a blog, so _joy_ for that. heh.

oh-huh

So, after re-reading that post below I realized I have learned a little bit more that I should add. While the accton router from open-mesh is indeed an OpenWRT device, it's not quite vanilla. It has RO.B.IN mesh setup specific to open-mesh. While this is indeed great, it's not what I needed. I took the files from open-mesh's re-flash instructions and replaced the root fs and kernel from the OpenWRT current version of Kamikaze. Once I did that I followed the OpenWRT docs and did what I wanted.

At present the device is running my IRC client, screen'd, connected to freenode. It's also a kismet_drone for me so I can get an idea of the competing wifi signals in my area. I had previously done this work, and then the Toyota dealership across the freeway started one up on channel 11 and caused me some problems. Channel 3 had looked great based on the previous survey, but my new crappy cordless phone that claims to be a 900mhz cheapy knocks me off of channel 3 every single time you turn it on.

I'm looking to setup an IPv6 tunnel on the thing, and make that an IPv6 only access point. That should be nice. My woman has mentioned the possibility of either an HP Mini-note with expresscard data via one of the cellular providers, maybe even Clearwire, or an iPhone 3g with data. This isn't until after the garnish stops and her additional income starts rolling in... but still it's some really nice geek fun and connectivity. The 3g will only be an option if tethering isn't too expensive because I will eventually be getting the HP Mini-note either way. Once I do I'm sure I'll be... keeping more of this type of crap up-to-date.

How do you install OpenWRT on an Accton MR3201a from open-mesh.com?

You don't!

The really sad part is that it actually took me about 30 minutes to figure that out. I ordered one of the MR3201a's from open-mesh, and it showed up on Saturday. Now, I didn't come to open-mesh because I was looking for an off-the-shelf-product. I wanted a platform, specifically, for playing with OpenWRT and some of the captive portal solution's that are out there.

I chose this device because of one line in the product description.

"Modifying the firmware will NOT void your EULA or warranty. We fully encourage and support the open-source community. If you "brick" the router, we'll help you get it back to life. Experiment, learn & enjoy without fear..."

I assumed this meant that I would need to install the vanilla OpenWRT on it in order to access the device myself. No company would give me complete and total control of the product I paid for, would they? Open-mesh does!

Once I realized, from reading the Directions for re-flashing the device to factory I realized this thing was already an OpenWRT device.

So I logged into Open-Mesh's dashboard and created a Network. Once everything was entered the little beast popped on with two networks. One open; one secured. I used the advanced settings to specify the root password, and was able to ssh right into the device. A full on, amazingly customizable OpenWRT platform to play with.

The part that truly suprised me about this device was the fact that a large number of the toys and such I needed to play with on OpenWRT are already included and ready to go! The product and service that Open-Mesh is offering is incredible.

The roadmap for the project has some really exciting developments that appear to be coming soon. I think my favorite part was the birthing of an open source mesh management solution OrangeMesh.

Well, now that I have new toys it's time to get busy. I can't believe how happy I was with this product... half of the stuff I wanted to do this weekend was already done. Score!

don't fear the re...wind button.

I don't know why the television industry is so up in arms over the fact that DVR's will allow us to skip over the commercials. I think this fear is definitely misguided. I have found that I only remember to fast forward through the commercials if they annoy me. If they aren't annoying I don't even think about it. It's largely based on if they increase the volume by some huge amount because they think there's a chance I've left the room to evacuate my bladder or get a soda to refill it.

The key, though, is that the dvr also works to their advantage! I find myself repeatedly rewinding to catch some detail of a commercial I've missed. That, however, only works if they actual manage to interest me. You can't interest me if you annoy me first.