You might be wondering where all of my website posts are. Well I am moving away from BlogEngine and GalleryServerPro technologies and moving towards my own engine that I am developing.
This means that it will take time for me to iron out all of the issues with the site, so please be patient.
My posts on this website will now focus on the following topics:
Programming
c#,
programming,
tccc
These are the session that I plan on going to for the TCCC in April of 2011
Sunday 4/9
Sunday 4/10
I am pretty excited for a good majority of the sessions, some of the other sessions might just be filler. Every year I go to this event I learn something new!
Programming
gentoo,
internet
Making your own home router for $500.00 (or less)
Getting sick of trying various consumer level SOHO routers, I decided to take my abilities to the next level. I wanted to build and configure my own gateway / router box.
There are several steps to accomplish to do this yourself, and hopefully this post will illustrate the steps that I took. The first step is to choose an operating system. Any flavor of linux will follow similar steps below, but personal I knew and trusted Gentoo http://www.gentoo.org/ over the other flavors. If I were really paranoid about security though, I would probably go with a linux distribution like Net BSD or similarly hardened linux distributions.
The second step that I took was to obtain the hardware. Your mileage may vary, but here is what I bought:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16819115206
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16827106274
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16811154062
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16833124120
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813131288
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820226048
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822148231
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B000N4WRFY/ref=ox_ya_oh_product
A few things to note about the hardware. The first is that the wireless card is probably the toughest choice. If you get the wrong card for your linux distribution, you will end up placing a lot of RMA requests. I personally went through 3 different card vendors until I settled on the card that I got.
Another thing to note, is the price. You can cut corners here and there to reduce my cost of $500.00 to something more in line with SOHO routers. This article will entirely be based on the hardware that I have selected above.
The third step is to get all of your reference websites in order. Here are the links that I used as a reference:
http://gentoo.chem.wisc.edu/gentoo/releases/amd64/current-iso/
I choose to download the install-amd64-minimal-<date>.iso file Then simply you follow the directions to install Gentoo located in the handbook http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/handbook/handbook-amd64.xml?full=1 When I finished installing Gentoo, I installed the following packages using portage:
After those instructions, I went to http://en.gentoo-wiki.com/wiki/Wireless/Access_point After all of the above steps were done, the real fun begins. Configuring the files to do what I want them to do.
I personally set everything up like a bridged connection http://en.gentoo-wiki.com/wiki/Wireless/Access_point.
One more thing to note, is that the wireless card I used (D-Link DWA-556 Xtreme N PCI Express Desktop Adapter) works with the latest kernel (2.6.30-gentoo-r5 at the time of this writing). You will need to use hostapd to run it in "master" mode (that is the ability to run as a wireless access point instead of just another wireless node). The driver that you want to use in hostapd is 'driver=nl80211'. Also, the driver that you want to use for the wireless is AR5418. Currently you can only run in 802.11g mode (not n, even though the card supports it). That means you have an upgrade path, once n is supported you don't need to replace the card.
I would love to hear from other people who DIY with home routing. Please leave a comment with packages that you use on your system, or good utilities that you run to keep your home network going.
Travel
trip
We got back in town on Saturday from our cruise to Alaska. The weather was pretty rainy, but accomodations were made to keep us occupied during the bad storms. I will have to say that the staff on board the Golden Princess were very friendly and accomodating. The land based excursions were the prize attractions.
The Golden Princes in her glory:
Pam loves dolphins:
The ZipLine excursion:
The second night I had troubles with the swaying, so I ended up missing the first formal dinner night. I guess I am not as used to the water as I thought I would be. We were not able to get entry into Victoria Canada because of rough waters which makes me a bit sad because I wanted to see castles. Saftey of the crew and passengers is obviously more important though.
Gaming
diablo 3,
pc game,
video game
Well it appears that the folks at Blizzard decided to scoop up individuals who were sick of playing World of Warcraft. It appears that Diablo_3 has already hit wikipedia (that means it's official right?)
The gameplay footage looks amazing. Currently, there is only two characters revealed. You know how Blizzard is though, they say something is going to be built and it comes out five years later. Here is a few youtube videos of it:
Technology
technology,
web 2.0
One major thing that has caught my eye (and thoughts) in the past 10 years on the internet is the direction it appears to be going. It used to be the way to keep people informed about news and events was through BBS boards that you would dial into and read a list of posted items (much like a web forum). Then the next big thing to communicate online with other people was IRC channels. You could log into a server, type in /join <channel> and chat away in real time with friends and family (and anyone pretty much who cared to join the chat room). AOL and Yahoo then stepped in and created a web based / software based Chat Rooms which enabled non tech savy individuals to share the fun.
Then the internet exploded with new methods on communicating with people. Mind you now, the internet was developed originally to share data and information between colleges and military bases. Around this period the internet took people by storm, there was no restriction on who could provide content and there was no restriction on what method they used. News groups, Web Forums, Web Blogs, LiveJournal (DeadJournal and other variants), Email, and other methods of communication. There was only one problem to these methods, it took time to write content. It took time to make sure that it was what you wanted to post to the internet. In many cases it also costed money. If you wished to put a blog out there, you would have to pay out a monthly fee to some service who would do it for you.
Then the service provides found ways to make it easier to communicate with these methods. Found ways of posting to the service through your cell phone and ways to post without having to have a complicated login process. The posts then moved away from being well thought out posts that provided information to posts that were short and simple. Posts that stated things like "I went running today". As if it was a major accomplishment that everyone in the whole internet needed to know.
Now you can see another progression away from forums, blogs and service providers to microblogs. Systems such as Twitter, Pwnce and the like. So now they move from a more information post to a less informational more chaotic little blurp about what someone did during their day. Chat being too complex, E-mail doesn't reach everyone on the internet only those who you know, Facebook only reaches people in your "friends list", LiveJournal is pretty much a dead horse after the sale. That leaves only two options, those of us who stick to blogging and those of us who chatter about our daily lives. So I pose the question to people which system do you prefer?
Do you enjoy daily updates (hourly, minute by minute playback) of everyone's activities? or do you prefer blog posts which delve into a deeper part of thought?
I think it's quite obvious which system I prefer, but I was just wonder what people thought was more important to them.
Gaming
dungeons and dragons,
gary gygax
Many of the online comics that I read every morning decided to take a moment to dedicate one strip to Gary. I think this just shows how important of an influence he was for many imaginations out there.
I am sure there are more out there, but these are the ones I tend to frequent.
Programming
dungeons and dragons,
gary gygax
Programming
programming,
python
While working on a school project using wxPython and XML I was intrigued by the way that Python wants you to handle XML. You have three options, 1) expat, 2) SAX or 3) DOM. All three methods happen to be very disgusting to implement. I decided that it would be worth time spent to find a good way to convert XML to an extensible object structure. I actually found that method at this URL http://aspn.activestate.com/ASPN/Cookbook/Python/Recipe/149368. The best part of this snippet is that you can call an elements name, get their child, get the name of the child, get an attribute all really fast (because the author used expat).
Permalink
for child in element.children :
if child.name == "Panel" :
pnl = wxPanel(frame, pos=(child.getAttribute("x"), child.getAttribute("y")), size=(child.getAttribute("width"), child.getAttribute("height")))
for control in child.children :
self.setControl(pnl, control) panels.append(pnl)
else :
self.setControl(frame, child)
Personal
acm,
health,
personal
I have recently been told that I have what they call border-line high Cholesterol and it made me re-evaluate what foods I choose at the grocery store. Previously I was paying attention to just foods which did not include High_fructose_corn_syrup because of research which shows that man made corn syrup leads to really high upper and low downer feelings in people. You should try this as an exercise sometime in the grocery store, just take the food you normally purchase and see if high fructose corn syrup is one of the top five items on the ingredients list.
The main point of this post is that now not only do I have to pay attention to high fructose corn syrup, but now I get to pay attention to foods with lower Cholesterol. This means goodbye to butter, to string cheese, to whole milk and to nice juicy steaks. So far I have been doing quite well in the past few grocery trips in keeping track of what I eat. The only thing that I really cheat on is the whole milk, I just cannot go without it. So as a compromise, my wife and I agreed to have less than one glass per day.
In the end, we are all in control of how we look, feel and our overall health. I encourage everyone who may read this to read the labels when they go grocery shopping and educate yourself on what each item in the ingredients list means. Look at the nutrition charts and make sure you are not taking in too much trans fat or Cholesterol.
Gaming
gaming,
video game,
xbox 360
Music
algorithms,
music theory
I used to be a HUGE music theory buff, that is up until the day that my life got more complicated by computers. I used to play the Baritone_saxophone during my 4 year stay at Rosemount High School. Additionally, I took AP Music Theory where the test involved listening to the teacher play on the piano and write down on sheet music what she was playing. The toughest part was always the first note (especially for those who do not have Perfect Pitch or other ability), then the rest was just a simple progression of notes.
I sometimes wish I had a piano, and even better yet I wish I was really good at playing one. If you are wondering what sparked this thought process, it involves eating dinner and browsing google videos. This one particularly caught my eye:
I do realize that he probably has sheet music, and he even most likely downloaded it from the internet. I still wish I could play even half as good as he can. I guess that will be a good goal for me to attempt when I get out into the work force.
Edit: While looking for a good icon to use for my music category I found this amusing link : Advanced Mathematics in Music Theory
College
gentoo,
homework,
university of minnesota
I think it's crunch time. It's that time of the school year when everyone and their mother wants my attention. For those of you who may not know, I am currently on Academic Probation. AP means that I got under a 2.0 in one semester (last one obviously) and that in order to get off of it, I need to score a C or higher in ALL of my classes. So there are three weeks of school and one class that I seriously need to score high on the final. I guess I will be reading a lot of psychology books before the end of this time.
Additionally, my fiance and I are in the process of moving to St. Paul. We will be living pretty darned close to the Saints stadium so if you want to hang out or something call.
Some of the neat things I have done with technology recently are:
Some interesting research I have read recently:
College
acm,
icpc,
university of minnesota
Well our team got 8th place in the region, and 1st place on campus for the programming contest. We tried really hard and were right with many things that we did. One of the problems we kept getting a "wrong answer" on because the test cases were screwed up. I sent out a request to the judges to double check the test cases. They said the test cases and solutions were correct and our team had a "wrong answer". So we skipped it and moved on, only to find out an hour later our prediction was correct and their test cases were inaccurate.
When all was said and done we had 5 minutes left on the clock and we were almost done with our 6th problem out of ten when we had a formatting issue with printf. Then time was up, it is really so unforgiving. At least we competed and we got first place on the campus which is a good thing. Also getting 8th is not that bad either especially with the turnout of teams. You can look at the results here ICPC sound byte so long as they keep the link up. Look for University of Minnesota : null_ptr
Afterwords I went to a buddy's house and played an X-box game called Gladiator and had a few drinks. I am nice and calm at the moment (almost ready to pass out.) Tomorrow I get to work on programming code all day long yay for me.
E-mail me
@kristin_mead Mine is apparently addicted to those Costco Croissants. Got to them through 4 different plastic bags at one point in time.
Just finished the alien space DLC for Fallout 3. Probably the most fun I have had in a long time with a video game.
@julielerman I've felt that code in books didn't make much sense. Instead, a website, you type in the page #, then get code in any language.
@theRaychul Just get this ... http://t.co/Z0zDR4TK External USB drive that works with Apple.
The opinions expressed herein are my own personal opinions and do not represent my employer's view in anyway.
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