In preparation for Tuesday’s Lunar Eclipse I’ve been practicing photographing the moon. In this sequence of photos the moon is a bit over exposed (except for maybe the top photo) and the moon wasn’t quite in focus. I’ll have to do better before the eclipse.
At the new apartment Jill and I are having a little problem with our wireless network. I have an older D-Link DI-614+ that doesn’t have quite a strong enough signal to provide good networks speeds throughout the apartment. It has worked great for years, but it’s on one end of the apartment and we use our laptops largely on the other end in the living room. There are a number of walls between us and it, so it’s understandable that it’s having some difficulty getting to us.
Our first solution was to get a new G router that would hopefully provide faster speeds. First we tried the Linksys WRT54GS. Then we tried a Netgear WGT624. We went back to the Linksys WRT54GS but added a Linksys WRE54G. All of these have been returned and we are back to using the D-Link. We are now contemplating purchasing an Apple AirPort Extreme. If we still need a network extender we would be able to get an AirPort Express, although that’s an expensive solution.
Here are the shortcomings of each router we tried, and why I will likely never buy one of their products again, especially Linksys:
Linksys WRT54GS
My biggest problem with this router is that its configuration site doesn’t work in Firefox on a Mac. I’m not sure if it works in Firefox at all, but I wasn’t able to try it in Windows. It did work in Camino though, so once I figured that it it made things a bit easier.
However, the second time I tried to set it up (with a new actual router since the first one had already been returned) I wasn’t able to get it on the internet.
Linksys not only doesn’t give any instructions on how to set up its products with a Mac, its user guides crash Preview when they are opened. Luckily I had Acrobat, but most people using OS X don’t bother with Acrobat since they have Preview installed by default.
Netgear WGT624
This router wasn’t the easiest to setup. It mis-diagnosed the type of internet connection I had, it wanted me to manually set up my IP and other network settings. I was able to get it up and running on the internet through the advanced settings. However, once I got that part figured out I had no problems with it. However, it still wasn’t strong enough and didn’t improve the connection speed in the living room.
Linksys WRE54G
This is one of the worst products I’ve purchased in years. Do not buy this network extender. I found a site giving step by step instructions on how to set up a WRE54G. Even though I tried following these instructions I was never able to connect to the extender’s web interface. I even tried to set it up with all three routers at various stages. I was at least expecting it to work with the Linksys WRT54GS but I wasn’t even able to get that working. This was the most frustrating product of the three because it never got working at all.
I’ve set up a personal wiki as an online notebook for myself. I’ve tried using a number of different options to keep my thoughts and notes organized, including Moleskine Notebooks of various sizes and Google Notebook. In both cases I’ve found it hard to organize my ideas and to find things later.
I contribute to a number of wikis already, so I know how to administer and use MediaWiki very well. It will hopefully allow me the flexibility to organize and track my notes to the degree that I wish.
I’ve had a number of half formed blog posts sitting in MT that I’ve transitioned to the wiki already. I’ve also added del.icio.us bookmarks, Google Reader shared items, and a special Amazon Wishlist that shows what I’m currently reading and thinking about.
This new personal notebook will grow and evolve as time goes on, as long as I actually use it. As it does, I’ll keep you updated as to what I’ve found works and doesn’t through its evolution.
This is a response to one of my friend’s, James Naugle’s, commentary on the Thomas Barnett video in my last post.
For the purposes of kicking off some discussion I should say that although I get a big kick out of Barnett, we need to keep what he is saying in context. He is a visionary… by trade… he comes up with big ideas and visions of what the future ought to look like.
He kinda glosses over details… they aren’t his department. And those details can be a real pain if the operational/ tactical guys don’t handle them early.
If you want a more tactical look at things I highly recommend John Robb. His book Brave New War should be required reading for everybody in the Department of Homeland Security.
If you read the comments that John Robb and Thomas Barnett have made about one another you get the sense that they don’t exactly see eye to eye. John Robb thinks that Barnett lives in a fantasy land where everything can be fixed through greater connection. Barnett, on the other hand, thinks of Robb as the eternal pessimist who thinks the current world order will end no matter what we do. In fact, they are both right. But if you look at the line between the two you will find that they are two sides of the same coin.
Barnett sees ever increasing globalization as our salvation, bring peace and prosperity to the world. (The Leviathan and SysAdmin forces he talks about in his lecture are to get to this perfectly globalized world, something he fails to address in that quick 23 minutes.) Robb, on the other hand, sees the threats that globalization brings. He sees super-powered individuals (not in the X-Men sense but in the 9/11 hijacker sense) that can create their own foreign policy and wage war without the backing of a state.
What neither of them have focused on is how to achieve what Barnett wants while mitigating the threats that Robb foresees. In other words, what we need is resilient communities. We need communities that can absorb shocks and last through shocks. Our communities need to rely more upon simple, local systems. Electricity generation that’s done on your rooftop instead of three states away. Food that is grown at the end of the block instead of in California’s Central Valley. Communications networks that route around disturbances (the internet already does this fairly well but still relies heavily on its backbone).
When looked at in this way, the home power and slow food movements aren’t just environmentally friendly, but contribute significantly to national security. If we want to avoid the system disruptions that John Robb foresees, these movements will need to be co-opted by the mainstream and not left to wallow in the hands of environmentalists.
People seem to hate the design of this site, especially the font choice. I’m quite happy with it, but I don’t want to dissuade people from reading my site because they find it ugly. So I’m just starting to think about changing it.
The thing I like most about my design is that it’s simple and not cluttered. However, I’m thinking of adding this:
