New Router Firmware
I saw a post on Lifehacker about setting up a different firmware on my home router. I’ve tried this before with DD-WRT, HyperWRT and Open-WRT. The only version that I was able to get set up easily was HyperWRT. HyperWRT was alright (read functional) but it certainly wasn’t fantastic. In setting up the other two firmware I managed to brick two routers so I eventually gave in and left the stock firmware on my main gateway router.
Tomato
Last night I set up Tomato and I am very pleased with the results. I really like the eye candy that shows how you are using your bandwidth and I feel that this feature may prove to be useful in the future. I am also very interested to see how much bandwidth my house uses considering we have a few servers, two laptops, and a bunch of small devices that all connect to the internet. I will post some results at one month, three months, and hopefully a year.
Troubleshooting
The install went really smoothly. I uploaded the new firmware right over my old firmware (with fingers crossed) and I was running again in under a minute with no further configuration needed. The only issue I had was with configuring the bandwidth logs to save over the network to another box. I had to learn to configure Samba, which is the Linux version of Microsoft Windows shared folders. Normally, from within Linux, I connect via ssh to all my computers since it is secure (as opposed to Microsoft Windows shared folders). This is much easier to configure for me and I gave up bothering with Samba years ago. But to get this feature of Tomato working I needed a Samba share to push the logs to. I was able to configure everything and I was able to connect from my laptop to the share via smb://192.168.1.4/logs but I was unable to get the router to successfully connect. First, I was receiving the error:
"CIFS VFS: cifs_mount failed w/return code = -6".
While tracing the connection attempt with wireshark I saw that the only difference was that my laptop was connecting successfully to smb://192.168.1.4/LOGS while the router was failing to connect to smb://192.168.1.4/logs. I changed the case so that the share name was uppercase and then I started receiving the error:
"CIFS VFS: cifs_mount failed w/return code = -1".
I was able to resolve this by changing my samba configuration (/etc/samba/smb.conf) from “security = share” to “security = user”. After making this change and restarting samba everything worked fine.
This posting is a little late in the year but my current excuse is that I have been sick (fevers of 102) on and off.
Most years I have laughed off making resolutions saying that I am resolving to not make a resolution. But this year I have come to the decision that if you don’t set goals for yourself (and tell others) then you won’t achieve anything of any importance. So this year I am listing my resolutions here.
Blog More
I want to blog more this year. I actually didn’t blog (on my blog) at all in the past year. I think that it is important to write a bit for myself. To enable myself to measure this I vow to blog at least once a week. With the realization that I have already missed the first week of the year so I will post some extra posts until I catch up.
Get my MCTS Certification
To improve myself professionally I have resolved to pass my MCTS 70-536 Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0 – Application Development Foundation Certification Exam. This is a goal that my boss has set for our group and to personalize it I have set the goal to be the first, in our group, to obtain this certification.
Learn about American History
My final goal is to improve my knowledge of history. The ideal way to do this might be to take a history course at the local Community College but I’m not, yet, that motivated. So to jump-start myself I will read at least two history books this year. I will also add bits of insight that I gain from reading these books in a blog post or two. My first book will be This Kind of War, by T. R. Fehrenbach. This book was assigned to me (and all the other officers in the Battalion) by my Battalion Commander as required reading for Officer Professional Development when I was in the Army. I enjoyed the book but I ETS’d before we finished it.
I have not picked my second book yet. I am struggling to decide if I should stay in the Korean War Era or not.
Last week one of my coworkers told me about Synergy (which lets you use a single mouse and keyboard with multiple computers across a network, and is cross-platform so I can use it on my laptop and my work computer) so I have been able to use my laptop more at work and I would rather have all my podcasts in a single location anyhow. Since my laptop is running Ubuntu I needed a Linux alternative to iTunes. I have been trying to find an alternative to Apple’s iTunes for managing my podcasts for quite awhile and ever since their, recent, upgrade to iTunes 7 my search has taken on a new life. I have heard that quite a few people that listen to Podcasts with iTunes have been having problems since the upgrade.
So I started, last week, using Amarok. One of the things that I didn’t like about it is that I can’t figure out how to list all the Podcasts that I have, yet, to listen to in one place. I know that they have some interface that lists them in an HTML page under the content tab but I can’t find a way to send them to my media device from there. So I found where the program stores it’s smart playlist information (~/.kde/share/apps/amarok/smartplaylistbrowser_save.xml) and I found a discussion online with how to interface with the SQL in the program and I wrote a query to pull up Podcasts that I haven’t listened to yet. The query is listed below. I am having problems with the filename portion though. It seems that Amarok saves the podcasts to directories based on the “Album name” and these have spaces in them that are encoded in the file location as %20′s. This wouldn’t be a problem except that SQLite does not have a Replace function so I can’t figure out how to replace the ‘%20′ with a space manually. Here is the code that lists them in case anyone is interested. And here is the SQL:
SELECT substr(podcastepisodes.localurl, 8, length(podcastepisodes.localurl)-7) as url, 0 as deviceid, podcastchannels.title as name, podcastepisodes.composer as name, podcastepisodes.composer as name, 'Podcast' as name, podcastepisodes.title as title, '2006' as name, podcastepisodes.comment as comment, 0 as track, 0 as bitrate, 0 as discnumber, podcastepisodes.length as length, 0 as samplerate, podcastepisodes.size as filesize, 0 as sampler, podcastepisodes.filetype as filetype, 0 as bpm FROM podcastchannels, podcastepisodes WHERE podcastepisodes.parent = podcastchannels.url AND podcastepisodes.localurl LIKE 'file%' AND isNew ORDER BY createdate DESC;
I just installed SuSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 10.1 RC and, by default, on my laptop the synaptics touchpad has the botton section or horizontal scroll mapped to the forward and back browser buttons in Firefox. Fortunately I found a reference for how to fix it on the internet.
The basic idea is that you need to go to about:config in Firefox and change mousewheel.horizscroll.withnokey.action to ’0′ and mousewheel.horizscroll.withnokey.sysnumlines to ‘true’
Warning: this post could be considered PG.
Mary got baptized yesterday. We got her up, and due to the hot weather (It has been 90+ for the past few days, and us without air conditioning) we decided to let her laze around in the morning in her robe. She played and smiled for a few minutes and we were able to get that on video [MP4, MPG, AVI]. I would have liked to see her get baptized in her robe (after all Jesus wore a robe), but mommy got her all dolled up in her baptism outfit before we left. The dress that she is wearing is the same dress that Sherri was baptized in 30 (or so) years ago.
She was very good during the whole thing. Everyone we spoke to, after the ceremony, said so. I told them that it was because she was very advanced for her age. She is already screaming at a kindergarden level. We got in to the church and she was in her car carrier so we decided to let her sleep until shortly before her part in the ceremony. I got her out of the car carrier while the congregation was singing “Amazing Grace” just in case she decided to sing along as well. She fell back to sleep in my arms during the Offeratory and woke just before we were called up. She seemed to be amazed at the whole congregation and was quiet until very close to the end where she seemd like she was going to fuss, so I popped the binky in her mouth and she was content. Of course we sat back down and right after the congregation finished singing during a long moment of silence she decided to put poopy in her diaper, very noisily, and drawn out. If you remember the scene in Autsin Powers where he got out of cryogenic suspension and then peed for two minutes straight stopping and restarting, then it was kind of like that. With poop noises. So I left the service to change her diaper and we made our grand exit. I’m sure that the choir was laughing when I left. Of course I couldn’t tell because I was also laughing, silently, to myself.
As usual, having her out and holding her after the ceremony meant that I got to talk to tons more people than I normally would although they spent the whole time staring at her. I guess I know what a Hooters waitress feels like now. I wanted to say, “Hey, my eyes are up here!” Anyhow, we went out to brunch at the Broadmoor to celebrate and then came home to relax ourselves.
Update: I have added multiple versions of the video (AVI, WMV, MP4, MPG). One of them should work for you. The WMV is the default as most of the people reading this will be running windows. I also updated again to fix the MP4 link that I mistyped.
I’m just a little busy. I will post more tomorrow.
Alright everyone! I know, I haven’t posted in, like…, forever. We have been very busy listening to the sweet, sweet music of our little Mary screaming all night long. In fact, Saturday night was the first night that she slept through the night. Mom has cut dairy products and green leafy, gas producing, vegetables out of her diet. I don’t know how she does it. If a doctor told me I had to cut steak out of my diet I would be, like, “yeah, whatever! I’ll do what I want!”. So three cheers for Sherri, “Hip, hip hooray!, and so on”.
Personally, I think that Mary slept through the night on Saturday night for one or two of the reasons below:
- the whole green leafy vegetable thing above,
- the dairy stuff discussed above,
- the baby, baby, please go to sleep CD that Grandma Marasco sent her (we received Saturday afternoon),
- to fool us into letting our guard down,
- as a Mother’s Day present for Sherri.
You choose. So I am trying to get some pictures out of my camera to put on the web but time keeps passing me by. Time is actually lapping me and I can’t keep up. I am going to take Thursday off, Nana and Poppa Turner are leaving to go home, so I can be home to be with Sherri and she won’t lose all her help around the house right away. Grandma and Grandpa Marasco are going to be here on Saturday and I have a half day Friday since we (SI International, my company for those of you way out of touch) are moving to our new building over the weekend. Then Aunt Corinne will be out here next Saturday, leaving on Tuesday. This gives Sherri another two weeks or so until she is on her own. Then her brother, sister and their two daughters will be coming to visit in late June.
Having the help around the house is very nice, and everyone has been great. For anyone who has sent a gift, Great Aunt Kat and Great Uncle Jim, thank you. We are going to get out thank you cards soon. We tried to put Mary in charge of them so that she could feel like she was contributing but she just tried to eat the crayon.
Thank you all.
Mary didn’t want to sleep last night. Perhaps it was the new house, maybe she slept too much during the day or it was too much excitement coming home from the hospital. Or it could have all been gas. Who knows? I doubt even little Mary does.
We, foolishly, let her sleep until 2000 (part of the reason is because the time went by so fast that we didn’t realize how late it was). We, and by we I mean mostly Sherri, fed her and got her ready for bed then we spent the next 3 hours trying to get her to sleep. We set up a pack ‘n play in our room that also doubles as a bassinet so that we could keep her close but every time we laid her down she started to cry. We tried all sorts of things. A fresh diaper, bouncing around the room a little, leg kicks, singing, pacifiers, bottles, breast milk, etc. But she wasn’t having any of it. She was crying at a pitch audible only to dogs (and mommies and daddies, well, and probably a great part of our neighborhood).
Finally, I collapsed into a rocking chair with her and rocked her and she quieted down and would take a pacifier. At around midnight we laid her down in the pack ‘n play and she slept for a bit but I woke up at 0120 when Sherri was laying down (painfully due to the C-section) for the who-knows-how-many’th time and the next time she cried I got up with her and changed her diaper and rocked her for about an hour. Sherri took her for the rest of the night and rocked with her so that she slept until I woke up and got ready for work around 0600.
Thank goodness Sherri’s parents are here because Nana Turner was able to take her this morning so that Sherri could pump and rest for a few hours. Sherri says that she slept with her during that 0200 – 0600 time period but that couldn’t have been too restful. It is a good thing that I had my “Cool Daddy” t-shirt, that Corinne got me, on or I may not have been able to handle it.
We hope that she sleeps tonight or that Abu-Ghraib stuff will look like nothing in comparison when Mary is done with us.
In Saturday’s Rhymes with Orange yet another comic was in reference to babies.
Sherri is due to come home today. Hopefully she will be released after 1PM sometime. I am getting pictures up as fast as possible. Thank you all for the well wishes, phone calls, and emails. If I haven’t returned a call or email you will have to forgive me, we are concentrating on getting “the girls” home safe and sound.
