Tomato (at one month)

Posted by & filed under Front Page, Tech.

I said that I would post some of the data that I gathered via my tomato firmware that I installed one month ago. Here are some pretty graphs. So far it looks like I run at a total of about 21 – 22 GB of data up and down per month. I think that I will try to collect this data over the year and collect stats. My next post on this will be in two more months after three months of full data has been collected.

It should be noted that, though the data is pulled from the interface the graphs were created with OpenOffice for more detail.

Dataflow by day over the last month. Showing usage of just under 1 GB per day with a sharp spikes on Fridays and in late January. Usage for download and upload by day showing Friday to be the day where there is the most udage. Showing usage of just under 1 GB per day with a sharp spikes on Fridays and in late January.

Google Reader Sharing

Posted by & filed under Front Page, Tech.

Google Reader is a great RSS reader. In addition to providing a great central location for reading my feeds it also allows me to, easily, share interesting feeds with other people that are using Google Reader. When I want to share an item from a feed I can click the “share” icon and “my friends” that “watch” me in Google Reader automatically have this show up in their Google Reader interface. Google has had this “share” icon for awhile and I never had a use for it until they released this ability. Before it “shared” the items but you manually had to send your “friends” a link to your shared items and they had to add it to their reader.

Google Reader has also had an email feature that allows you to email an item to a friend but I prefer the share button because, it allows my friends to choose to read the items or not, if they don’t like what I share they just hide my items in the interface. And, I am always loathe to put a person’s email address into a web form (with all the spam that people already get I hate to add to this).

Now, even though this is a great feature, I really feel that they need to add the ability to comment on an item that you share. There are many times that I share an item and I feel somewhat compelled to state why I am sharing it. I would also like to be able to share an item with a subset of my friends. Sometimes I share a tech item that might not be of interest to everyone but I know will be of interest to a few people. Or even better share items and allow people to subscribe to items that I’ve shared based on how I’ve tagged them. Maybe someone wants to see things that I share that are tech related but not political. I’m sure that Google is working on this feature right now.

Update on My MCTS

Posted by & filed under .Net, Certification, Front Page, Microsoft, Tech.

Summary

I have completed reading the “MCTS Self-Paced Training Kit (Exam 70-536): Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0–Application Development Foundation”. That’s 16 chapters, or 1,050 pages of lovely technical goodness. My overall assessment is that I definitely learned from every chapter. Some of this stuff I do every day and there are portions of the framework that I am still surprised by. I even started reading some chapters thinking, “Oh, this one will be a breeze.” and finished the chapter thinking that I wasn’t nearly as smart as I thought I was.

AAR

Now that I’ve completed reading the book I can look back and see what I’ve done wrong and should do differently for my next test.

What I did wrong

  1. Cramming a bunch of chapters into one day.
  2. Not keeping track of all the lesson tests.
  3. Keeping detailed notes.

I fell behind on my studying right out of the gate and to catch up I went through 7 1/2 chapters in one day. Although this felt productive it was a mistake. Near the end of my studying (the last two hours or so) I was just powering through chapters to get through them and I don’t feel that I got as much learning out of them as I could have. I think that in the future I would limit myself to a maximum of four hour studying in one day.

The result of this is that I have had to go back and reread 7 out of the 16 chapters. My other lessons-learned are related to this first key mistake also. Each chapter in the book is broken up into multiple lessons. At the end of each lesson there are questions that you can answer to test how well you learned key concepts in that lesson. I wish that I had kept track of how well I answered the questions to evaluate my progress on each lesson later. Instead I just asterisked the chapters that I needed to revisit. This resulted in my having to reread a bulk of information that I didn’t necessarily need to reread. I would have been better served to just reread the lessons that I had problems with. I also wish that I had kept notes as I read to pull the valuable nuggets of information out of the chapter that I really need to remind myself of.

To combat these mistakes so far, I have reread 4 of the 7 chapters that I feel that I didn’t quite get and I have plans to reread the other three. I have also created a document to help me study. First I have to commend Microsoft Press for publishing this book with a CD that contains an entire copy of the book as PDF. This is of great value to me because I can study on the computer if I need to (though I rarely do because I’m more prone to distraction). And I can also pull excerpts out and into a document that I can use for studying. To this end I have created a document using OpenOffice to help me study. It contains the following:

  • the table of contents (to track progress and take notes on troublesome lessons),
  • the questions from the end of each lesson (to test myself on the whole book in one go),
  • and the answers to the questions above from the end of each lesson (to score my answers to the questions).

I will be keeping this document updated as necessary and sharing it with people that need it for study. I would really like to make it available for download but, since it contains at least ten percent of the book directly copy and pasted into it but reformatted to meet my study needs I’d be nervous of violating copyright. Such is the legal climate in which we live I suppose.

Tomato

Posted by & filed under Front Page, Linux, Tech.

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.

New Year’s Resolution

Posted by & filed under Front Page, Personal, Tech.

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.

Listening to Podcasts on Linux

Posted by & filed under Front Page, Linux, Tech.

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;

SuSE Linux and My Synaptics Touchpad

Posted by & filed under Front Page, SuSE.

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’

Mary Gets Baptized

Posted by & filed under Baby, Front Page, Mary, Personal.

Warning: this post could be considered PG.

Mary laying on mommy and daddy's bed in her pink bunny robe that David, Debbie, Kailey, and Ashley got her. Mary sitting on our chair on a white blanket in her baptism outfit. The outfit is all white with flowered underwear and a white headband with a white flower on it. As usual she has the binky in her mouth. 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.

Mary, in my arms, after she was baptized. This is a picture of Sherri, Me (holding Mary), and the preacher. 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.

Laying flat on her back on our couch with her arms up above her head and her belly in full focus. 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.

Progress Report

Posted by & filed under Baby, Front Page, Mary, Personal.

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:

  1. the whole green leafy vegetable thing above,
  2. the dairy stuff discussed above,
  3. the baby, baby, please go to sleep CD that Grandma Marasco sent her (we received Saturday afternoon),
  4. to fool us into letting our guard down,
  5. 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.