Firewall flaming out on Thursday afternoon: $2000us
Trying to talk Lyssa and Laurelinde through reconfiguring the wireless access point to act as a temporary firewall over the phone: $21us on the phone bill for roaming charges
Pentium-3 @ 1GHz and 20GB of disk space: $0us, scavenged from a dumpster
Copy of OpenBSD: $0us by downloading it from the site
Brand new firewall for the Network: Priceless
Read more...
Coffee at 0500 in your hotel room: When you need it the most, you are least capable of successfully making it.
Read more...
I've been sent on the road again for work, this time to the west coast, and the lovely region of California called Palo Alto. It's 0606 EST as I begin writing this from my increasingly infirm partner in crime Windbringer from one of the Z gates of Dulles International. Security was a nightmare this morning - not only does everyone and their backup seem to be hitting the friendly skies this morning, but the physical security detail seems to have changed its strategies once again. Now they are inspecting boarding passes and presented identification with both ultraviolet lamps and magnifying monocles …
Read more...
In the words of my namesake, I'll explain later.
First up, one of my fellow retrocomputing afficionados named Toni Westbrook has undertaken an amazing project: Shredz64. Chances are, you've heard of the game Guitar Hero, in which you use a controller shaped very much like an electric guitar to 'play' rock music as a character in a video game. I've never played it, but it looks like it might be neat. Anyway, Westbrook is designing an interface for the Commodore-64 called the PSX64 that will let you hook a Guitar Hero controller up. He's also developing a game that works …
Read more...
Information Society's going on tour in 2008. Kurt, Paul, and James got back together after the release of Synthesizer and they're hitting the road. Word on the street has it that they'll be playing songs from all of their albums, and I do mean all of them. If rumour's to be believed, they might even play a song or two from their very early albums from the mid-1980's, like Creatures of Influence.
Geekgasm. Pure geekgasm.
Lyssa and I have already bought tickets to the Philadelphia show on 5 January 2008. Interestingly, the schedule at Dancing Ferret (great job signing InSoc …
Read more...
I think the USB v2.0 chipset in Windbringer is failing - all USB v1.0 and v1.1 devices I've used work fine, but now the bottommost jack is acting flaky. All storage devices plugged into the bottom are unreliable, and vanish (from the OS' point of view) randomly, leaving stale file handles and hung processes all over the place. I've seen this pattern of behavior before: Once USB fails completely, everything else tends to collapse like a house of cards during flu season.
Stopgap measure: Purchase a USB v2.0 PCMCIA card. Going to do that tonight.
Solution #1 …
Read more...
Things have finally slowed down somewhat in Austin, affording me the opportunity to write a long-overdue update. Workdays have been long (averaging thirteen hours out of every twenty-four), which is why I've been quiet lately.
From what I've seen of Austin, it's a pretty nice place. I"m situated a stone's throw from the airport, and within visual distance of the highway system, which has been both relaxing (coming from an urban background) and a pleasant change of pace from the places that I'm usually put up by my employers.
Two nights ago Tiffany (co-worker and fellow foot soldier fighting …
Read more...
Short, sweet, and to the point because I"ve been out of touch for somewhere in the neighborhood of a week now. Also because I'm tired, jetlagged, and fighting back a nasty headache that seems to want to reduce my forebrain to a 386.
Last Wednesday night, Lyssa and I drove back to Pennsylvania to spend the Thanksgiving holiday with her family. We spent part of Friday with my folks after several misadventures in trying to find an open bank in the North Hills on Black Friday. We parted company briefly on Saturday, and I traveled back to PIttsburgh to …
Read more...
'Living documents' will undergo major revision immediately after all team members print it out.
Read more...
Late in October of 2007, a story hit the news wires about people getting raided by local SWAT teams because someone had called up the local 911 services and claimed that gang wars had broken out, heavily armed people on drugs had killed their families, and stuff like that. Some pretty bad things went down as a result, and as one would expect law enforcement doesn't take kindly to anyone monkeying around with their communications networks, especially when lots of heavily armed cops wearing body armor are called out as a result. A subsequent investigation revealed that a group of …
Read more...
