Wireless networking headaches

This morning I setup a wireless LAN at a 3-person law firm in Delaware. Initial setup was pretty straightforward, but it's not what I consider to be fully functional. I could use some input here.

The network consists of three PCs, two eMachines boxes and one Dell, all running XP Home (they had these boxes before they called me). Each PC has a Netgear WG311T wireless NIC which was installed according to the manufacturer's directions. There is also a Netgear WG302 wireless access point. The intented use of the LAN is to share a cable modem connection and allow file and printer sharing among the three users.

The Ethernet interface of the WAP has the IP 10.1.10.2/255.255.255.0. The first eMachines box is 10.1.10.10, the Dell is .11, and the second eMachines box is .12 The WAP and all three PCs are pointed to 10.1.10.1 for their gateway, which will be installed Monday.

Each PC is able to associate with the WAP and signal strength is excellent. All PCs are setup in the same Windows workgroup. No firewalls are running. NetBIOS over TCP/IP is enabled.

I was able to login and configure the WAP by connecting my laptop to its Ethernet port.

Problems:

1. None of the PCs can ping each other or the WAP.
2. The PCs cannot see each other in My Network Places, except that the Dell can see eMachines box #1, although not access its shared folders.
3. With my laptop connected to the WAP's Ethernet port, I can ping the WAP but none of the other PCs. Nor can any of the other PCs ping my laptop.
4. The wireless PCs cannot pull up the WAP's login page in a browser.

WTF? Will this not work until a hub/switch is connected to the WAP's Ethernet port?

Testing, testing

Over the course of this week I've been testing a new rev of firmware for our SMC 8013 gateways. These are the combination cable modem/router units that we use for our commercial customers. The updated firmware is supposed to fix some bugs found in earlier versions.

When we first testied on Tuesday and found that the DMZ feature was broken. There were a couple of other minor issues. So, back to SMC it went.

We got another rev yesterday afternoon and began testing once more. Things seemed to be going well. The problems we identified earlier this week were fixed. However, I discovered that the right kind of misconfiguration of the VPN termination feature can crash the box, with the only way to recover it is to use the factory reset button located on the back of the unit. Doing so returns the box to the default configuration. At this time we aren't enabling the VPN feature for most of our customers, although there are a few who are using it. So, we need to get it fixed before rolling it out.

On second thought, I won't upgrade the laptop

I posted the other day about possibly upgrading my Compaq Presario 710US. Upon further reflection, I decide it made more sense to replace Gondor, the trusty P3/733 that I built in 2000, and which remains my desktop PC at home.

Gondor will wind up replacing Rivendell, an ancient P2/300, as Judith's PC. I bought Rivendell from ASL way back in May of 1998. It came as a dual boot system with Red Hat 5.1 and Windows NT4 Workstation. The only major changes I've made to it in that time are doubling the RAM to 256 MB, adding an SMC wireless NIC, and redoing it as a Win98SE box for Judith (she wanted to run something or other than wouldn't work on NT4 or W2K). Hardware-wise, it's been solid as a rock, but it's really long in the tooth. I can redo Gondor with XP and it'll be fine for Judith's use -- web, email, light word processing. She ought to be able to get at least two more years from it.

Replacing Gondor as my main box will be a resurrected Bagend. It was originally built in 1999 as a P3/450. After I decided to host mail for building-tux.com onsite, it became my mail and fileserver running e-Smith. Then, about two years ago, it got zapped in a power surge which blew the motherboard and who knows what else. I was able to shift the hard disk into a scavenged Compaq Deskpro, do a little reconfiguration, and get mail.building-tux.com back up and running, and that's how it's been ever since. In the meantime, the rest of Bagend has been stuffed in my crawlspace.

I intend to pull Bagend out and strip out the motherboard and power supply. The floppy and CD-ROM drive may still be good, along with a case fan. Once it's gutted, the following components which I ordered tonight from Newegg are going in:

• Asus A7N8X-X Socket-A motherboard.
• AMD AthlonXP 2600+ "Barton" core CPU.
• Antec SL400 power supply.
• Asus Radeon 9200SE 128 MB video card.
• NEC 8x Dual-Layer DVD+/-RW drive.
• Maxtor 80 GB ATA-133 hard disk.
• 512 MB of Crucial PC3200 DDR RAM (one stick).

The OS will be SUSE Linux Professional, 9.1 for now, to be upgraded to 9.2 when it comes out in November.

If for some reason Bagend's case is not usable, I'll gut Rivendell instead and use it.

This is far from a high end system but it'll be a huge improvement over what I've got now, and should last me several years. I mainly use my desktop for web, email, remote system administration, and light use of OpenOffice.org. I should be able to run DOOM3 on it, though. :-)

While I was ordering the computer parts, I tacked on a Netgear FS108 8-port 10/100 switch to upgrade the core of my LAN. The LANMaster T12 10 meg hub I have is solid, but slow.

Now I know who to vote for. :-)

Democrats are tolerant (?)

I work at a Bush campaign office in SE PA and the stealing and destruction of signs here is so rampant that at least 6 out of 10 people that walk in our office are there to complain about and replace stolen signs. One family member of a staffer that is in a local union reported that at their last meeting they were each given Kerry signs and required to bring back and equal number of Bush signs.

From a thread on AR15.com.

It sure would explain why I see relatively few signs in Montgomery Country, which is very Republican.

Sounds like the "climate of fear" that Instapundit has mentioned several times recently.

And people think W is stupid?

More words of wisdom from President Numbnuts:

MATTHEWS: Let me ask you the question about—this is going to cause some trouble with people—but as an historian now and studying the Revolutionary War as it was fought out in the South in those last years of the War, insurgency against a powerful British force, do you see any parallels between the fighting that we did on our side and the fighting that is going on in Iraq today?

CARTER: Well, one parallel is that the Revolutionary War, more than any other war up until recently, has been the most bloody war we‘ve fought. I think another parallel is that in some ways the Revolutionary War could have been avoided. It was an unnecessary war.

Had the British Parliament been a little more sensitive to the colonial‘s really legitimate complaints and requests the war could have been avoided completely, and of course now we would have been a free country now as is Canada and India and Australia, having gotten our independence in a nonviolent way.

Holy shit. WTF??? This is one of the most retarded things I've ever read. OF COURSE The Revolution would not have been necessary if Parliament and King George III had been more "sensitive" to the colonists' grievances. And if I was Catholic I could theoretically be the Pope.

Earth to Jimmy ... PARLIAMENT AND GEORGE III WEREN'T INTERESTED IN THE RIGHTS OF THE COLONISTS. As events really occurred (as opposed to Carter's fantasy), The Revolution was needed in order to protect the colonists' rights as Englishmen. The end result was that to protect those rights, it became...

necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the Powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them....

(Go read the whole Declaration of Independence here.)

As for "as free as Canada and India and Australia[?]" With all due respect to the residents of these countries, they all have far more socialist goverments than the US. By its very nature socialism is inimical to liberty. Socialist wealth redistribution schemes always require that the government take liberties from their subjects in order to accomplish their goals. Government power is the flip side of individual liberty. Nor do any of these countries have a Bill of Rights comparable with that of the US, which recognizes preexisting human rights not subject to the whims of society.

Finally, he's no historian if he thinks that The Revolution was our bloodiest conflict. It wasn't even close. Total number of American combat casualties in The Revolution was a bit less than 11,000. In the Civil War/War of Northern Aggression, Union combat casualties stood at about 635,000, plus about 335,000 for the CSA. In World War I we suffered around 320K casualties, with over one million in WW2. (Stats here.)

Mr. Carter, please go back to your peanut farm and STFU.

John Stewart on "Crossfire"

I'm not a John Stewart or "The Daily Show" fan, but Mr. Stewart's appearance on "Crossfire" was something else. There's a transcript here. He really ripped into "Crossfire" in particular, and the major media in general, about the disservice they do to America with the way they cover politics.

Busy, busy, busy

Pardon the lack of posting around here since Friday. I've been busy.

On Saturday my partner and I wrapped up the big network cabling job that I previously mentioned. It's a total of 17 LAN drops, 17 4-line telephone drops, 4 single phone line drops, and one run of some coax for CATV. One multiline phone and one Ethernet drop need to be terminated, but we need to wait until a large piece of equipment is delivered. My client will be moving into the new office on October 30th, and we may need to wait until then to complete those two lines.

Yesterday I stayed home and watched Amanda and Alexandra, while Judith went out to take a break. G-d bless her, I don't know how she does it every day after school with both little ones. I couldn't. By dinner time last night I was fried.

Speaking of last night, I watched part one of Farscape: The Peacekeeper Wars on SciFi. Part two is on tonight. Farscape was definitely one of the best science fiction shows ever to appear on TV and it's a shame it got cancelled. It's cool that they went ahead and made a little mini-series. I'd like to see the show revived.

This morning I had a meeting to go over a couple of DNS-related things over in Moorestown. It was the first time I'd been in Moorestown since I transferred to my new job three months ago, and it was nice to see some of my former coworkers. While over there I also did some research in response to a request from my boss's boss, with respect to definitions and expected ratification dates for various 802.11 wireless networking standards. I bailed out of there at about 1445 to make sure I'd beat rush hour traffic on the PA Turnpike.

Maybe it's time to upgrade my laptop

I did a little looking around online and I think I can upgrade my Compaq Presario 710US, getting a noticeable performance boost without spending too much money. The box has a 1 GHz AMD Duron CPU, which is fast enough for my needs.

The first thing it needs is more RAM. It should cost me about $80 to get a 256 MB SODIMM from Kingston to bring the total system RAM up to 512 MB, which is the most the laptop will take. For about the same amount of money, I can get a new, larger 5400 RPM hard drive from NewEgg. The current drive is 20GB, which if I setup a dual boot system (XP and Linux), realistically means I have to split it into two 10 GB partitions. That's too small. If get even just a 40 GB 5400 RPM drive, not only will disk I/O dramatically improve, I can devote 20 GB to each OS. This in turn would allow me to rely on the box as my primary PC and redo Gondor for Judith. (Gondor has a 15 GB drive and I'm only using a bit more than half.)

I need to think on this.

Automating IE, Part 2

One of the other guys in my department, who was working on the problem mentioned in my last post, came up with what should be a better solution. He uses a Mac, and wrote a shell script which employs curl to make the updates via the router's HTTP interface. The size fo the script is less than 1K.

We may need to use a Mac rather than a PC to run the script, but we can scrounge one up.

Automating Internet Explorer

Yesterday afternoon I was asked to come up with a way to automatically reconfigure an option in the SMC cable modem/router boxes we adopted last year for our commercial customers. While there is a minimal command line interface, the option that we need to set is only available through the HTTP interface.

Did I mention that we're now up to about 40,000 customers?

I tried using Keytext but couldn't get it to do what I needed. I then tried Clickymouse and so far, I am able to get it to reconfigure a router pretty quickly. Once I have the router's login page loaded, the macro logs in, goes through and sets the needed option, then applies it and logs out.

However, when I try to automate pasting a router's IP address into Internet Explorer, the macro blows up. (I'm using IE because I know that the SMC was developed with it in mind. It probably works OK with Mozilla but I don't want to add something else to possibly troubleshoot at this time.)

So at this point I have a way to speed up the reconfiguration of a boatload of deployed routers, but it's still going to require babysitting to feed in the boxes' IPs and deal with any errors.

A coworker suggested using a Perl script to parse the HTTP outputs and input the required config changes, and I suppose it's possible. For example, there are Perl scripts that will allow one to use Yahoo! Mails's HTTP interface via a POP3 client. The only problem is that I don't know Perl.

The really annoying things about this all-of-a-sudden high priority project are that the config change that we're making is something that's been known about for a few years, and the next version of the firmware that will be loaded onto the boxes will allow for this config change to be made easily via SNMP.

How fast does God drive?

216Km/hour (~134 MPH), apparently.

French cops busted Eric Clapton at that speed in his porsche 911 Turbo.

Slowhand .... lead foot.








("God" in the title of this post is a reference to graffiti which appeared in London subways in the 60s -- "Clapton is God.")

More Gmail invites

I have 5 Gmail invites available on a first-come first-serve basis.

If you want one, send an email to davemarkowitz at gmail.com.

New member of The Shooters' Bar from RI

David D'Augstino of Rhode Island is now listed in my list of pro-RKBA attorneys, The Shooters' Bar(SM).

A reader needs some Windows networking help

The following came in yesterday from Joe in NJ:

Dear Dave,

I am a fan of your blog and your site for going on 3 years (when I discovered DayNotes).

I'm an IT manager in a school district. I normally can work out my own problems, but the following has me confused...I am looking for the simplest way of doing the following

I want to allow specific user accounts access to specific machines. We are taking about 4 user accounts and 100 machines that I want them to access. Conversely I want my other 1200 user accounts to be able to login into any machine. However I want to be sure that the 4 user accounts are only able to login to those specific 100 machines. Currently everyone can login everywhere. What is the most simple way of doing this? Windows 2000 domain controller, the 100 machines in question are Win 98 and 2000. The rest of the machines are Win 2000.

If you have any thoughts on this I would appreciate it. All the advice I got so far involves complex script writing.

Thanks,
Joe

Joe, thanks for your kind feedback.

I am hopeful that one of my readers has an answer for Joe. I've not done Windows system administration on that scale, so I really don't know. If you're reading this and wouldn't mind sharing some Windows networking savvy, how about submitting a reply comment to this post?

My favorite inexpensive handgun

Every so often I'm asked to recommend an inexpensive handgun. I invariably suggest the Makarov, or Pistol M, as it's designated in Russia. It's a simple, reliable, and surprisingly accurate design, and was the standard sidearm of the USSR from around 1950 until the Soviet Union's collapse. The Russians are now replacing the Mak with a newer design, chambered for 9x19, which is more powerful. However, the 9x18 Makarov is still a decent round for self defense, being a bit more powerful than .380 ACP.

My Bulgarian-made Mak is utterly reliable. I've put about 450 - 500 rounds through it. The only malfunction was a single failure of the slide to lock back on an empty magazine. It is the single most reliable semiautomatic pistol I've ever owned, and that includes two Browning High Powers, a CZ-85, a Springfield M1911-A1, and a Browning Buck Mark. Curiously enough, the Mak was also the least expensive. My dad has had similar experiences. I paid $130 for it several years ago, new in the box.

My testing of the Makarov pales in comparison to that described in this thread on Glock Talk. All I can say is, "Wow!"

Think your job sucks?

Then check out BBC-4's "The Worst Jobs in History."

Bulk email polcies

One of the things we've been trying to nail down with our outsourced email provider is their policy WRT to bulk email. This afternoon, one of our marketing managers working the issue asked me if during the course of my research, I came across such policies.

Most providers' email policies bar sending out unsolicited email, although other than that they don't go into a ton of detail. Verio actually has a pretty good, detailed policy. In my reply, I mentioned Verio and added the following as key points:

(a) That there must be a pre-existing commercial relationship between sender and recipient.

(b) Lists with over 50 recipients should be handled using a mailing list manager like Majordomo or ezmlm. The big problem with using a regular mail client to send bulk emails is that quite often all the recipients get listed in the "To" field, which facilitates address harvesting by viruses. This is a MAJOR problem.

(c) Message size on bulk emails should be no more than 10 megs each, preferably much less. Sending out big file attachments to multiple recipients is a huge waste of bandwidth. The better course of action would be to send out a link that the recipient can click on to download it if desired. If a customer REALLY needs to send out massive attachments, or to very large distribution lists, he should be running his own SMTP server

Dell laptop power adapter recall expanding

According to this article at CNN.com, Dell is expanding its recall of some laptop power supplies. You can find out if your power supply is affected here.

I just ordered a new PS for my Slacktop.

Windowmaker

If you're running Linux or BSD on a low end machine you may not want to deal with the overhead of a full-blown desktop environment like KDE or GNOME. KDE is even starting to feel sluggish to me on Gondor, my P3/733, after getting used to how responsive my work Dell P4/1.4 Gig laptop running XP is. So, this morning I decided to try out a couple alternative window managers on Gondor.

I've mentioned my use of Fluxbox, which is very lightweight and suited for olde hardware like my P2/366 laptop. I don't have Fluxbox installed on Gondor and didn't feel like downloading it. I do have FVWM2 installed, and briefly gave that a try. It's lightweight but SUSE's default setup is fugly. I'm a bit tired today after being up in the middle of the night with Amanda, so I didn't feel like dinking around trying to make it look decent. Perhaps another time.

Another fairly lightweight (although not nearly as so as Fluxbox) desktop is Windowmaker. I already had it installed and it's one I've used before.

Windowmaker is a descendent of Afterstep, which was intended to be a clone of the NeXT GUI. AAMOF, Afterstep was the first Linux GUI I used, back when I bought Rivendell in May 1998. Both Afterstep and Windowmaker are very easy on the eyes. In the words of its developers:

Window Maker is an X11 window manager originally designed to provide integration support for the GNUstep Desktop Environment. In every way possible, it reproduces the elegant look and feel of the NEXTSTEP[tm] user interface. It is fast, feature rich, easy to configure, and easy to use. It is also free software, with contributions being made by programmers from around the world.

Definitely check it out if you're running Linux or BSD on an older machine.

Running X on MS Windows

I want the ability to run X applications using my XP laptop. To do so, I can either get a commercial X server for Win32, such as Hummingbird Exceed or Winaxe, or go the open source route. I'm going to try the latter. I'm currently installing Cygwin on my company Dell Latitude, taking advantage of the fat pipe I have at work.

Aside from giving me some of Linux's functionality on XP, I'm looking to use the Cygwin X server to connect to Gondor when I'm at home, allowing me to export its display to the laptop so that I can run apps on Gondor but have their display sent to the laptop's screen.

I could use VNC -- which is based on X -- to run apps on Gondor with their displays on the laptop, but I'm hoping that the Cygwin X server will give me better performance.

Another way this would be handy if it works well on the company laptop, is to install Cygwin on my personal Compaq, which I use in my side work. I could use a X server when going to one client's site, who's running a SUSE email server. I currently do all my admin for that box -- whether I'm onsite or at home -- using SSH and occasionally webmin. I do have X on the box though, and for some purposes having X could be handy.

"Man tax" proposed in Sweden

When feminists get out of hand:

STOCKHOLM (Reuters) - A group of Swedish parliamentarians proposed levying a "man tax" to cover the social cost of violence against women.

"It must be obvious to all of us that society has a huge problem with male violence against women and that has a cost," Left Party deputy Gudrun Schyman told Swedish radio on Monday.

Unbelievable.

The Pond

An old farmer in Kansas had owned a large farm for several years. He had a pond in the back, fixed up nicely with picnic tables, horseshoe courts and some apple and peach trees. The pond was properly shaped and had been planned for swimming.

One evening the old farmer decided to go down to the pond to look things over, as he hadn't been there for quite awhile. He grabbed a 5 gallon bucket to bring back some fruit from the trees. As he neared the pond he heard voices shouting and laughing with glee. As he came closer he saw it was a group of young women skinny dipping in his pond.

He made the women aware of his presence and they all fled to the deep end of the pond. One of the women shouted to him, "We're not getting out until you leave!"

The old man frowned and said, "I didn't come down here to watch you ladies swim naked
or make you get out of the pond naked." Holding up the bucket he said, "I'm here to feed the alligator."

Moral: old age and cunning will triumph over youth and enthusiasm every time!

Hacking the Fluxbox menu

As I've previously mentioned, my old Dell Latitude is running Slackware 10 setup to use the very lightweight Fluxbox window manager. I chose Fluxbox because it requires fewer system resources than KDE, Gnome, or even Afterstep. It therefore allows me to make the most of this old hardware.

There are a couple of ways to launch apps after you're in Slackware's Fluxbox setup. The first is to right-click on the desktop, which brings up a menu, while the second is to start the app from a terminal (although you start your first terminal from the menu). I wanted to add a couple of items to the menu so that I didn't have to type in a command to start them any time I wanted them to run. This is pretty easy.

My Fluxbox config file is /home/dave/.fluxbox/menu. It's a plain text file which starts off like:

[begin] (Fluxbox-0.1.14)
[exec] (rxvt) {rxvt}
[exec] (mozilla) {mozilla}

The first line is the beginning section of the menu (duh). The lines starting with "[exec]" are entries in that section for executable programs. The next item, in parentheses, is the text that appears in the menu. The final item, in brackets, is the command that will be run when you click on it. So, to add an entry for the gkrellm system monitor, I added:

[exec] (gkrellm) {gkrellm}

To add an app installed to a location not in my PATH, you'll need the full path to the executable, like this:

[exec] (thunderbird) {/opt/thunderbird/thunderbird}

One nice thing is that when you edit the "menu" file, changes take effect as soon as you save it. You don't need to restart X and have Fluxbox re-read the file.

Good vendor experience for a change

This morning I had a good vendor experience for a change. It was a conference call/web demo with a large wholesale hosting company. Their in-house tool used for the admin interface and customer-facing interface really impressed the heck out of me. On top of that, their webmail app blew me away. Its got a very nice look and feel that doesn't resember other webmail interfaces I've seen. It looks like you're viewing a regular mail client from within a browser. I doubt I'd want to use it over dialup, but on a nice fast cable modem connection I bet it would rock. We're not looking at this company so much for email hosting as for web hosting, but this offering is too good to ignore, IMO.

Different kids

It's amazing how different kids, even siblings, can be. Amanda is three months old today (and Alexandra is 22 months old). I was watching Judith play with Amanda tonight and noticed how much more aware she is of her surroundings than Alexandra was at her age. She wants to be involved with the goings on around her, in contrast with Alexandra, who to this day is very content to amuse herself.

It's going to be really interesting to see how they develop over the next several years.

SUSE 9.2 Professional Announced

I guess I won't be upgrading Gondor to SUSE 9.1 after all. Novell announced today that 9.2 will be shipping next month. Highlights include:

• KDE 3.3 and GNOME 2.6 graphical desktop environments for enhanced usability and desktop comfort.
• OpenOffice.org 1.1.3, a complete Word-, Excel- and PowerPoint-compatible office suite.
• Novell® Evolution™ 2.0, the newest community edition of the popular Linux e-mail and personal information client, with integrated support for Microsoft* Exchange 2000/2003 connectivity, compatibility with Novell GroupWise® using IMAP, plus support for a broad set of standard e-mail
• GIMP 2, a comprehensive image processing and graphics creation tool.
• Inkscape, a new vector graphics application that outperforms all other Linux alternatives.
• Nvu, a Web authoring system that combines Web file management and easy-to-use WYSIWYG (what-you-see-is-what-you-get) Web-page editing.
• A selection of commercial software, including full versions of the text processing application TextMaker and spreadsheet application PlanMaker from SoftMaker, full-version backup software sesam from SEP, as well as a demo version of MainConcept's video editing software MainActor 5.

Sounds pretty sweet.

Back in Mozilla for now

I'm back in Mozilla for now. I just feel more comfortable with it, aside from the compatiblity issues.

One thing I had to do was fix the link to Brian Bilbrey's mirror of Tom Syroids Daynotes in the last post. Whne logged into Blogger in Opera, the URL button is missing, so I couldn't add the link.

I'll keep Opera installed, though, since it's useful for large downloads because it will automatically resume them if interrupted.

Tom Syroid's Insights

Daynotes.net/.org webmeister Brian Bilbrey has put up a mirror of Tom Syroid's "Insights at Syroid Manor," up through the time Tom stopped posting last year. There is a lot of good info, especially WRT to Linux, to be gleaned from Tom's musings.

Check 'em out at http://syroid_insights.orbdesigns.com/.

Trying Opera again

Every so often I give Opera another try as a browser. I'm always attracted to how smokin' fast it is, but it always seems to be incompatible with some of the sites that I access.

For example, the current stable version of Opera -- 7.54 -- is not compatible with Gmail. Gmail isn't a mission-critical app for me, but I do check it a few times each day to read the email lists I subscribe to using that address.

Now, I'm trying out Blogger and before I hit "Publish Post" I'm going to make sure I copy this post to my clipboard, because several of the buttons in Blogger's online editor are missing. I'll post this using Mozilla if blogger completely barfs on Opera.

Mozilla and Firefox may be less "standards complian" than Opera, but they are more compatible with a wider variety of Web pages.

Didja ever notice...

... that when you hear about someone's property being defaced becuase it's bearing a political sticker or sign, that it's virtually always a Republican getting vandalized? For example:

An unknown suspect fired several shots into the Bearden office of the Bush/Cheney re-election campaign Tuesday morning.

From WBIR-TV, Knoxville, TN.

I guess the reason all those Dems favor gun control is because they are psychologically projecting their own lack of self control on the rest of society.

Strange behavior from Firefox

It took me several tries to get the previous post up, and I had to switch to Mozilla from Firefox to do so. Blogger seems to be having problems with Firefox 0.91 on my Slackware box (yes, I know I need to upgrade). It seems to work fine with Mozilla 1.7, though.

Very strange.

Crummy network connection

My primary network Internet connection today is running like crap. Web surfing is slow and GAIM repeatedly drops offline. Luckily, I have a second network to which I can connect.

I generally leave my Slackware laptop on the secondary connection. Aside from redundancy, the secondary doesn't run through a content filter. This is good if I need to look something up which I'd just assume not be filtered.

Smoking moms may increase the incidence of colic

Smoking Moms May Boost Tots' Risk of Colic

By LINDSEY TANNER AP Medical Writer

CHICAGO (AP) - Mothers who smoke during or after pregnancy increase their babies' risk of developing colic, those vexing, inconsolable crying spells that affect up to 20 percent of U.S. babies in their first few months of life, researchers say.

The culprit, based on studies in adults, is likely nicotine, which increases blood levels of a gut protein involved in digestion, said Brown University epidemiologist Edmond Shenassa. That may result in painful cramping that makes babies cry, he said.

Shenassa and Harvard University researcher Mary-Jean Brown reviewed several studies, including six that involved more than 12,000 babies.

The data suggest that compared with nonsmokers, mothers who smoke during pregnancy face about double the risk of having infants with colic, Shenassa said.

Full story here.

As if smoking around kids or while pregnant isn't bad enough. And having recently expeirenced a colicky baby, I can say that anything that reduces the incidence of colic is a good thing.

Time to geek out

I'm in the mood for a geek fix. I haven't used the iMac that I was playing around with over the summer in awhile, and with it taking up desk space, my old Dell running Slackware 10 has been sitting moribund in my cabinet. So, this afternoon I put the iMac back in our storage closet and broke out the Dell.

The first thing I did was to login as root and run "swaret --upgrade -a" to automatically upgrade everything that needed it. That took only a few minutes, after which I logged out, fired up X, called up rxvt, and launched Firefox. This machine is old, wih a P2/366 and 128 megs of RAM, but the combination of Slackware and the Fluxbox window manager makes it usable. Doubling the RAM would give me a noticeable performance boost, but I'm reluctant to sink any money into it at this point.

It's nice to have a Linux box back up and running on my desk.

From my alma mater

Via Linux Today, I found this article at The Triangle, the student newspaper of Drexel University, my alma mater. Versatility of Linux Distributions Allow Choice. It's a fairly basic overview of several distros.

Bush, Kerry, and the Jewish Vote

Here's some food for thought:

WEB EXCLUSIVE | JEFF JACOBY
Bush, Kerry, and the Jewish vote

By Jeff Jacoby, Globe Columnist | September 28, 2004

WHEN they go to the polls in November, which of the two major parties will American Jews support? Consider:

At Party A's national convention, a prime speaking slot went to an infamous racial inciter, one with an ugly history of Jew-baiting. At Party B's convention, a leading speaker recalled with empathy the many pre-9/11 victims of terrorism, such as Leon Klinghoffer, whom the killers ''marked ... for murder solely because he was Jewish.''

Party A's presidential nominee said nothing about Israel in his convention acceptance speech. Party B's nominee, on the other hand, made a point of referring to ''our good friend Israel'' - and his campaign later distributed that portion of his remarks to its national e-mail list.

Increasingly, Party A is the political home of those who demonize Jews, such as the South Carolina senator who claimed that the war in Iraq was launched to ''take the Jewish vote.'' Conversely, Party B has driven out the anti-Semites in its midst, and is now where the most ardent philo-Semites in American politics are concentrated.

So which party will American Jews vote for in November?

For the rest of the story, click here.

And, just for the record, there is no amount of money you could pay me to vote for the candidate from Party A.

A productive weekend

This was a productive, if not particularly restful weekend.

Yesterday morning I drove down to Hockessin, Delaware to do a site survey at a small law firm which needs a network installed so that they can share files among three users, and also use a cable modem. They currently use dial up access from Earthlink and AOL, which has become a major impediment to receiving large files. Based on their projected type of usage and the small size, I'm going to put in a proposal to install an 802.11g wireless LAN, which I'll lock down pretty tightly.

One thing I did so that I could see if any special configuration will be needed was to fire up my laptop with a Netgear 802.11g NIC in it, and see if I could detect any WLANs. I picked up 5 or 6, one of which was a wide open Linksys WAP which had been taken out of the box and plugged in. I didn't attempt to loging to the WAP, but the SSID was the default and I was able to get an IP, since WEP was off. I gave the secretary at the law office a few of my business cards to pass out. :-)

Today along with a colleague and a couple guys we paid per diem, I was at one of my client's to install LAN and phone cabling in their new office. We got all the cabling run -- 37 drops -- and partially punched down. My partner will rturn during the week to finish punching down all the phone and LAN jacks, and certify all the runs with a Fluke tester. My client will be moving in on October 30th, at which time I'll install three new Netgear 10/100 switches and a new UPS, plus general hand holding during the move.

This job is going a long way to paying for the new gutters and soffets I had to get for the house last month.

Posion ivy finally getting better

I seem to be getting over the poison ivy. It's been a long two weeks dealing with it. I highly recommend not getting it yourself. I should probably put on a MOPP suit and go around my yard and hose down anything that looks like the damn vine with herbicide.

On a side note, I emailed my friends earlier this week about PI, and one of them wrote back to me to let me know that not only is he not allergic to the stuff, he actually eats a bit of it each year to annoy his wife, who's apparently hyper sensitive to it. Nick, you suck.

House passes bill to repeal DC handgun ban

Bill Would Restore D.C. Rights to Handguns

By JIM ABRAMS Associated Press Writer

WASHINGTON (AP) - Residents of the nation's capital would be able to own handguns and other firearms under a House-passed bill acclaimed by its supporters as a victory for Second Amendment rights but deplored by District of Columbia officials concerned about increased violence.

The 250-171 vote to end a 28-year ban on handgun ownership was the second victory this month for advocates of gun rights, following the decision of congressional leaders not to extend a decade-long ban on assault weapons.

Unfortunately, the Senate probably won't do anything with the bill this session. But it's a start on restoring the Second Amendment rights of DC's citizens. (See full story here.)

Why I'm not enthusiastic about Bush

Since I've recently taken shots at Kerry, I might as well explain why I'm not thrilled with Bush:

• He said he'd sign an extension to the late Assault Weapons Ban if it reached his desk.
• Consolidation of a number of Federal agencies into the Dept. of Homeland Security.
• Federalizing airline security workers into the TSA. WTF?
• The PATRIOT Act.
• Signing the McCain-Feingold "Campaign Finance Reform" (AKA Incumbent Protection Act) even after saying that it was probably unconstitutional (passing the buck to SCOTUS, which in turn dropped the ball).
• Not sacking a bunch of neo-cons after they mismanaged the aftermath of Operation Iraqi Freedom.

That said, he's still not as bad as Kerry.

Ack!

If you tried to read this blog between about 1430 - 1450 EST today you probably got a bunch of gibberish. I was attempting to add some links in my right pane and something got mangled.

We now return you to your regular programming.

Heinlein said it well

If you are part of a society that votes, then do so. There may be no candidates and no measures you want to vote for ... but there are certain to be ones you want to vote against. By this rule you will rarely go wrong.

--in "The Notebooks of Lazarus Long," in his masterpiece Time Enough For Love.

This is why, although I am far from pleased with the job W has been doing as president, I will cast my vote for him come November. Really, I'll be voting against Kerry. There is no way in hell I could vote for a man who:

• Has what, a 20% attendance record at his current job?
• Despite his recent protests, is an inimitable foe of the Second Amendment.
• Waffles his position on every issue.
• While a commissioned officer in the USNR met with enemy officials in war time.
• Defamed American servicemen wholesale in sworn testimony to Congress.
• Would make American interests subordinate to those of the UN.

What handgun are you?

Well, according to one source, I'm a Smith & Wesson .44 Magnum.

(Image edited out 'cause it FUBARed my formatting.)

"Smith & Wessen .44 Magnum. You are old school. Fat
Sheriff Deputies fancy you. Reliable but not too practical."

What handgun are you?
brought to you by Quizilla

Actually, I prefer the K-Frame Model 15 Combat Masterpiece .38 Special, or the Model 625 .45 ACP if an N-Frame. Both are more pleasant to shoot and more practical.

Sad news

Upon checking my email when I got home tonight I heard the sad news that fellow Daynoter Mike Barkman has passed away.

My deepest condolences go out to his family. May he rest in peace.

Lycoris picks up e-Smith SME Server

Long-time readers (all four of you) will know that I run the mail server for Building-Tux.com on e-Smith SME Server. In a nutshell, SME is a Red Hat-derivative that in about 15 minutes lets you take a whitebox PC and turn it into the functional equivalent of a Cobalt Qube, complete with POP/IMAP/SMTP for email, DNS, DHCP, firewalling/router functionality, and file/print services. It's been rock solid for me. The current uptime on mail.building-tux.com is 249 days. Likewise, an e-Smith box that I setup purely as a file server for a client just sits there and runs, with extended power failures being the only cause of downtime.

Last year, Mitel, the company which owned the commercial version of e-Smith spun off the unsupported version, which was hosted at Contribs.org. Not much has happened with the free version of the platform since then.

So, it was good to hear that the moribund e-Smith was bought by Lycoris. Hopefully, this will cause more folks to give it a shot. I hope it takes off.

Powerpoint

Up until today I've avoided ever creating anything in Powerpoint, although I have of course viewed more than my fair share of PPT presentations. I've never cared for PPT, due to the same sorts of things discussed in "Powerpoint Makes You Dumb."

My avoidance of PPT ended this morning, when my boss asked me to create a presentation on (a) why we need to affiliate with a domain registrar, and (b) who I think we should choose. Ah, well.

It took me an hour or so to whip up a draft PPT presentation with about 30 slides. It's easy to use, which is one reason why it's so popular. I'll go back and look at my draft again either later today or tomorrow morning, then send it to my boss for approval.

Jeanne

It may not be all that much compared with what the folks down in Florida have been dealing with, but starting this afternoon, Jeanne took a big dump on the Philadelphia area. My street was completely submerged for about an hour; asphalt is just peeking through now. We got a fair amount of amusement watching some of the neighborhood kids raft down it.

A few minutes ago I spoke with a friend who picks up the train for his daily commute into center city Philadelphia at SEPTA's Miquon station. I'd offered to come get him in my Expedition, but the station is at a low elevation down near the Schuykill River and apparently it's waist-deep. So, with everyone else, he's getting back on the train and they'll go to another station where somebody will be able to pick him up.

Divorced men...

Whoa.

Zonked

I am still taking Benadryl to cope with the itching from the damn poison ivy, so I'm a bit zonked out today. I took a half day since I wasn't being all that productive anyway. I may or may not post again later today.

Poison Ivy

For the last week or so I've had a case of poison ivy, which has been driving me up the wall. It's on my forearms and ankles/feet. I've been taking Benadryl and using a hydrocortisone cream, both of which help to keep the itching under control most of the time. The Benadryl unfortunately is also causing me to walk around in a haze. Yesterday I started putting witch hazel on the rash a couple of times a day and that helps for a bit, too.

Today I went out to the drug store and bought a tube of Calagel, which included a trial size of tecnu, a cleanser meant for getting out the uroshial oil that causes the rash.

I also found this site, which has a lot of information on poison ivy, poison oak, and poison sumac.

The funny (?) thing is I don't even know where I came into contact with the poison ivy.

Big Bad John

(I'm no Bush fanboy, but this hits the mark WRT to his opponent.)

Every mornin' on the Hill you could see him arrive
Standing six-foot-four, weighing one-twenty-five
Kinda' scrawny at the shoulders and lacking a spine
And when he spoke at all, it was mainly to whine
(Big John, Big John) Big Bad John

Nobody seems to know what's in John's soul
His 'beliefs' are based on the latest poll
'Though he'll say what it takes to get your votes
It's the leftist agenda that he really promotes - Big John.

Some one said he came from Boston town
Where he joined the Navy and gained renown
'Earning' three purple hearts and one bronze star
The home folks said, "This boy will go far"
(Big John, Big John) Big Bad John (Big John)

Then came a day back in '71
When he renounced all the medals that he had won
Then turned against his country and his Navy friends
And sold them out for his own selfish ends (Big John)

He appeared before Congress and on left-wing talk shows
Giving aid and comfort to America's foes
It was clear to see whose side he was on
Some say he helped cause the fall of Saigon - Big John
(Big John, Big John) Big Bad John (Big John)

He claims to be for the working poor
Yet he owns 5 mansions from shore to shore
He never had to work a day in his life
'cause he learned it helps to have a wealthy wife! - Big John

Now he wants to be our next President
and Commander-in-chief of those he resents:
The American soldiers who fight and die
To give him the freedom to tell us his lies
(Big John, Big John) Big Bad John (Big John)

Thousands have sacrificed their young lives
To help ensure that our nation survives
A vote for Kerry is a slap in the face
To all the brave soldiers that he's disgraced
FADE (Big John, Big John) Big Bad John (Big John)

--Unknown

This just doesn't make sense

By now you no doubt are aware that former pop star Yusef Islam, nee Cat Stevens, was denied entry into the US due to alleged links with terrorists. What I want to know is if he indeed has such links, why wasn't he arrested instead of deported???? If he has links he could be a source of intelligence.

The whole affair is just bizarre.

Damn disgrace

Tonight was back to school night in Philly, where my wife teaches 4th grade. Her school is predominately poor, predominatly black, North Philadelphia. She has 32 kids in her class (which in and of itself is a disgrace but not the subject of this rant).

Out of 32 kids, how many of them had their parents attend tonight?

Four.

That is a damn disgrace, but it's pretty much the same story every year.

There is more to being a parent than popping out kids and letting the gummint send you a welfare check. But the dysfunctional culture that has been fostered in areas like where my wife teaches discourages stable families. A large part of this can be laid at the feet of LBJ's "Great Society," which may have been noble in intent but the unintended consequences totally fucked up a large portion of our society. By making mothers ineligble to receive welfare payments if the father was around, the social welfare types broke up a lot of families, and once broken, the odds of the next generation forming stable families was pretty much shot. It's a self-perpetuating cycle, creating more and more wards of the state, even when those wards are adults. This cycle started before the welfare reform of the '90s but hasn't been broken.

Compounding that is popular urban culture, which doesn't hold learning in high regard, the War On (Some) Drugs that incarcerates a huge chunk of black American males, and no wonder the current situation exists.

There is no easy fix, but a good start would be to get rid of the current version of Prohibition. At least that way a lot of these kids' fathers would be in the neighborhood instead of in prison. As for instilling a sense of parental responsibility, that I have no idea how to do.

A horse is not a vehicle in Pennsylvania

...at least according to the PA Supreme Court. However, Justice Michael Eakin dissented, thusly:

"A horse is a horse, of course, of course,
but the Vehicle Code does not divorce
its application from, perforce,
a steed as my colleagues said.

"'It's not vague,' I'll say until I'm hoarse,
and whether a car, a truck or horse
this law applies with equal force,
and I'd reverse instead."

Why the browser should not be part of the OS

From C|Net this morning:

Microsoft this week reiterated that it would keep the new version (more secure - DM) of Microsoft's IE Web browser available only as part of the recently released Windows XP operating system, Service Pack 2. The upgrade to XP from any previous Windows versions is $99 when ordered from Microsoft. Starting from scratch, the OS costs $199.

Microsoft pretty much has its users by the balls if they want to continue using Internet Explorer. It's actually too facile to just say, "Use Mozilla." Even if you run Mozilla -- either the full suite or just Firefox -- on Windows, IE is always present, since it's integrated into the OS. (99%+ of users aren't going to be able to install Win98 Lite.) So, the exploitable code is still there.

Nor is it realistic to say that everyone should upgrade to XP. First, it costs money that many don't have. Many older PCs that run Win 9x or 2K fine don't have enough horsepower to run XP. They may or may not be upgradeable, but if so, that still costs money. Finally, many businesses use applications that will not run properly on XP.

First, Microsoft used its monopoly to get 95%+ of Internet users to run IE, then abandons a huge chunk of them. Nice ethics. This is exactly the kind of conduct which shows why an appplication should not be part of the base OS. It's also a good argument for open source -- if the source was available, it's more than likely that someone would come up with fixes for IE's security flaws, given the size of the installed base.

Windows XP SP2 CD

Today's mail brought the XP SP2 CD that I ordered a couple of weeks ago from Microsoft. MS wants everyone to install SP2 so badly, they're sending out the CDs for free, and encouraging you to share it with your friends.

MS is also suggesting that before you install SP2, you go to http://www.microsoft.com/sp2install "for latest recommendations."

Vendor follies

A big portion of my job involves dealing with outside vendors who are looking to sell us their products or services. The vendors run from being really on the ball to complete idiots, and the area in between.

For example, one rather large web hosting company is interested in having us partner with them for the hosting we outsource for our commercial customers. They were supposed to get me a demo account so I could login and try out their online control panel, site creation wizard, etc. Their VP of Sales called me this morning to see if I'd tried them out yet, and I had to inform him that no, I hadn't received the account info. It's possible that my employer's spam filters blocked the email but I kinda doubt it. Anyway, I had them resend the info to my Gmail address, and finally got it.

Another vendor, this one a domain registrar, called me yesterday to follow up on a conference call we had last week. I was first told to inquire about their solutions a month or so ago, and sent off an email requesting info. I didn't hear anything from them for a few weeks, which is not cool. (I don't normally refer to my employer by name. Hint: it's a BIG cable company and ISP.) When we finally had a conference call with the vendor, they couldn't meet a number of our requirements without bringing in a third party.

I don't know about you, but I'm not interested in having my outsourced vendor outsource something to yet another party in order to meet a requirement for something they should be able to handle itself.

So when this guy called me back yesterday I was not favorably disposed towards his company after having to tell him several times that no, I am not ready for another conference call, and I'll call or email him if I want any more info. High pressure sales tactics do not work with me.

In contrast to this wanker, I had a very pleasant experience dealing with another domain registrar. They responded to my initial email promptly, met 100% of our requirements right off the bat, and set me up with a demo account which includes a web page control center that they already co-branded for me. Instead of trying high pressure sales tactics, they sought to meet and exceed our expectations. That, folks, is how you make a sale, and that's why I've strongly recommended to the PTB here that we go with them.

Jean Luc Picard???

Umm, ok.

I do want to point out that I have much better hair.

AR-15 Ergonomics

One of the best features about the AR-15 rifle is the generally excellent ergonomics. If you are a righty, the ergos are better than pretty much anything else available. If you are left-handed like me, however, there are a couple of things that can be tweaked to improve the ergos.

The stock AR-15 safety/selector switch is perfectly positioned to be operated by the right thumb of a RH shooter. However, there's no corresponding lever for us southpaws, unless you add an aftermarket part. Both ArmaLite and DPMS sell ambidextrous safeties for AR-15s. Since the DPMS unit is about $10 cheaper, I ordered one this afternoon. I was pleasantly surpised to see that UPS Ground shipping is included in the $29.95 price.

The other items that need to be fixed for lefties are the magazine catch and bolt release. However, I find the bolt release easy to release with my left index finger, and I can deal with using my right hand to release the magazine. Buffer Technologies does sell an ambidextrous mag catch, for those who want one, though.

Juror summons

When I got home yesterday and checked my mail I saw a juror summons from Montgomery County in with the latest issue of Network World and my normal junk mail. Most people dread being summoned for jury duty but I'm looking forward to it.

The jury is a keystone of our justice system. If one is charge with a crime, jurors are the (hopefully) impartial authority judging one's guilt in a tripartite system made up of two state elements -- the judge and prosecutor, and one non-state element, the jury. As such, jurors can serve as a valuable check against state abuse of the system.

In civil matters the juror's role is also important, as an impartial (again, hopefully) arbiter between plaintiff and defendant. Personally, I'd rather have my case -- whether as plaintiff or defendant -- decided by a group of my peers than by a single judge, who's mood often depends on what he had for breakfast.

Serving on a jury is one's civic duty. Having educated jurors is essential to the proper functioning of the system and safeguarding the rights of our citizens. Instead of being a burden, jury duty should be regarded as an honor.

If I get on a jury I'll be surprised, though. As long-time readers know, before I became a professional geek I was a practicing attorney, and I've maintained my law license. So, I expect that if I'm called, I'll be excused during voire dire (jury selection).

I would like to serve, though.

Let them eat crow

From Reuters:

NEW YORK (Reuters) - In a blow to its credibility, CBS News said on Monday it had been misled over the authenticity of documents it aired in a story challenging President Bush's military service and announced it was mounting an internal investigation.

"Based on what we now know, CBS News cannot prove that the documents are authentic, which is the only acceptable journalistic standard to justify using them in a report," CBS News said in a statement.

It's about time that CBS fessed up. What a bunch of partisan a-holes.

Not an auspicious start to the day

As I was walking through Suburban Station this morning on my way into the office, I realized that I'd left my access card at home. Crap. So, I had to go to the lobby reception desk and get a visitor's pass for the day, and once I got upstairs, had to wait until someone else got here so that I could get in.

I can tell this Monday is going to be a PITA.

Valley Forge Gun Show

Let me first get this out of my system: ARRRRGGGHHH!!!! Yup, it's National Talk Like a Pirate Day today. :-)

Ok. Yesterday I braved torrential rain leftover from Hurricane Ivan and a huge crowd and hit the gun show in Valley Forge. This was the first show in the area since the sunset of the AWB, so I expected it to be mobbed. It was, despite the foul weather.

I noticed several vendors selling Tapco's AK folding stocks for $50 - $55 each. Regular price from Tapco is $49.99. I also saw some no-ban configured AR-15s from Olympic Arms and Bushmaster in the $750 - $850 range.

No new guns came home with me (the Colt I picked up Tuesday tapped me out for the time being), but I did pick up a few things:

• One vendor had a very good price on a Butler Creek folding stock for my Mini-14. Aside from folding, it's quite comfortable and the pistol grip includes a storage compartment. I'll be able to stow a small cleaning kit in there.
• A USGI M-16 silent sling for my AR-15.
• A SureFire G2 Nitrolon flashlight in OD, again from a vendor with a good price. It's a little bigger than a 2-AA cell penlight but quite a bit brighter than my 4-D cell Maglite. It uses lithium cells, which have about a 10 year shelf life.
  
• A .50 caliber ammo can in excellent shape.
• A couple of NRA stickers.
  

Holy cabling job

I just sat down and reviewed the marked up floor plan my client sent me showing where they need LAN and telephone drops. The job is about twice as large as we'd been led to believe.

This is a Good Thing. :-D

Nice feedback

Mail like this makes writing this blog worthwhile:

Dave,

If you have any of the gmail invites left over, I would appreciate one.

My daughter (grown lady at this point) and I recently started (in my case restarted) shooting and I'm rediscovering the fun in putting holes in paper with my old S&W 38 Special and newer Colt clone 38 Super. This is largely due to your consistent sharing of your firearms enthusiasm. Thanks!

Frank F.

You're very welcome!

And ofr my other readers, I still have a few Gmail invites left. If you want one, email your request to davemarkowitz [at] gmail.com

AR-15A3 & AK Range Report

First off, L'Shana Tovah (Happy New Year) to my Jewish readers.

I took today off and went to the Water & Wings range with my Colt AR-15A3 carbine, Saiga AK, and my Ruger Police Service Six. Due to time limitations, I didn't get a chance to shoot the Ruger.

I started off with the AR-15, which I bought Monday night in celebration of the sunset of the Clinton/Feinstein Assault Weapons Ban. It's a police trade-in gun made after 9/14/04, so until 12:01 AM this past Monday, this rifle would've been illegal for me to possess. With the sunset of the AWB, I can now possess a semiautomatic rifle which accepts detachable box magazines, and has a flash hider and collapsable stock.

The AR-15A3 came with a 16.1" heavy barrel, with a 1:9" twist. This will allow it to accurately shoot bullets up to about 65 or 70 grains in weight.

I stapled some paper plates (my favorite cheap target) to the frame at 50 yards. This was the furthest I shot today; longer ranges will need to wait. After loading the 20 round magazine with 5 Winchester .223 55 grain FMJ-BT loads from a 50 round value pack, I shot a group from the bench. It was little off to the left and about 1.25" in diameter. The carbine's short sight radius and somewhat stiff trigger prevented me from getting a smaller group. I'm sure the carbine is capable of MOA accuracy or better.

The Colt digest 100 rounds of the Winchester value pack 55 grainers without a hitch. My brother Josh accompanied me today, and he ran ~40 - 60 Federal American Eagle 55 grain FMJ-BT rounds though the gun, also without any problems. The last load I tried in the gun was Wolf 55 grain JHP. This is the "new" Wolf ammo, with gray polymer coated steel cases. It's considerably cheaper than American .223, so I like it for practice in my Mini-14, which eats it like candy. So, I was hoping that the Colt would like Wolf ammo as well.

Unfortunately, I got about 3 or 4 bolt over base failures to feed with the Wolf. It's loaded noticeably less powerful than the Winchester or Federal rounds, which may have contributed to the malfs. So, Wolf is good only as range ammo in my AR-15, although it did give me a chance to practice malfunction drills.

Overall, I am very happy with the Colt AR-15A3 Carbine. I'll be ordering an ambidextous safety, and looking into mounting a red dot sight.

I put about 80 rounds through the Saiga AK, which had been converted from a Saiga Sporter to an AK-103 clone by Hesse. After the first 140 rounds I put through the gun the fire control parts started to peen and cause malfs, so earlier this year I installed a Tapco G2 fire control group. Function is now 100% with 20 and 30 round mags.

This morning I was able to pick up the Tapco side folding stock I ordered last week, and which was waiting for me at the post office. It took me about 10 minutes to install this morning, including the time it took to remove the old shoulder stock. The folding stock seems well made, out of some kind of plastic, and is clearly marked with a "USA", so it can be used as a 922(r) compliance part. It's comfortable when shouldered. The one glitch I ran into is that the Galil-styled hinge mechanism is on the right side. I'm left handed, and when I shoot it bumps into my nose. Recoil with this rifle is very mild due to an AK-74 style muzzle brake, so it didn't bother me too much.

Today I brought my Romanian 75 round drum out for the first time. I only ran 20 rounds through it and had one bolt over base FTF. I'm not sure if it was ammo or magazine induced. After emptying the drum I switched over to the 20 round Hungarian AMD mag that I normally keep in the gun when it's in my closet. Aside from possible functioning problems, the drum makes the rifle awkward to hold. It's main purpose for me is to spite gun banners. :)

The 7.62x39 ammo I had with me today was Russian-made Sapsan 123 grain JHP. So far, I've shot up about 100 - 120 rounds of the stuff and it works fine. It's similar to Wolf, with lacquer coated steel case, but the powder fumes don't seem to stink as bad.

It was EBR day at Water & Wings, apparently. Aside from my two rifles, Josh had his post-ban Bushmaster XM-15 carbine, and a couple of other guys were there with ARs. In fact, one of them was a (formerly) LEO/military/export-only ArmaLite A2 carbine bought earlier this week at Surplus City, where I got my Colt.

Yahoo! Hotspot Locator

I just noticed that Yahoo! Maps now allows you to search for WiFi hotspots in a particular area. You can also search for other stuff like ATMs, for example.

Nice!

Microsoft e-mail proposal dealt setback

Internet engineers working on a standard for identifying the source of e-mail messages voted down a proposal by Microsoft to make some of the company's intellectual property a mandatory part of the solution.

On Saturday, a co-chair of the technical working group responsible for developing a standard for authenticating the origin of e-mail messages summarized the results of a vote by the group members. The group--part of the Internet Engineering Task Force and more formally known as the MTA Authorization Records in DNS, or MARID, working group--decided that Microsoft's insistence on keeping secret a possible patent application on its proposed technology was unacceptable.

More here.

Colt AR-15A3 Tactical Carbine

I went up to Surplus City tonight and picked up a Colt AR-15A3 Tactical carbine.

Apparently, Colt will not be selling any AR-15s in no-ban configuration to Joe Citizen, so this rifle will probably keep or increase its value (not that I plan on selling it).

Mine's a police trade-in but in excellent shape. Rob, the owner, told me that he sold ~20 of these today, along with a number of Colt ARs in 9mm. He also had a bunch of Mini-14 GBs with standard cap mags, and Ruger PC-40 carbines with normal mags.

A couple of really crappy pics of my rifle are at:

http://www.building-tux.com/images/AR15A3.jpg

http://www.building-tux.com/images/AR15A3_LEO_only.jpg

Cost? Maybe too much, but you only live once and I wanted to get one while the getting was good.

I'm taking a day off on Thursday and will post a range report.

Back to Mozilla 1.7

I've gone back to running the full Mozilla Suite, version 1.7.3, on my Dell laptop. It seems more stable and responsive than Firefox/Thunderbird. YMMV.

Gmail invites

I have 6 Gmail invites. First come, first served. If you want one, email me at davemarkowitz @ gmail.com.

Feedback on the gun thing

Not that I'm anti-guns, but I live in a country where we aren't allowed them, with the small exception of hunting type shotguns, underwhich very strict licensing exists (including inspection of where they're kept by an officer of the law).

The biggest difference I can think of, certainly in society here, between cars and guns is that while cars can be misused to cause harm, they are by and large useful things.

Guns however are much much less so. Sure, in certain situations they are useful, but by and large day to day, I don't think to myself "Boy, wish I had a gun".

That said, society over here is different. I've not had a gun, so don't miss it.

The above comment was posted yesterday by an anonymous reader. I'm reposting it here to address his points.

Guns, by and large, are "useful things." Americans use firearms over a million times each year to thwart a crime. The vast majority of the time, the gun isn't even fired. Merely brandishing it at the criminal convinces him that being somewhere else would be more healthy.

Cars are misused in the US much more frequently than guns. Two words: drunk driving.

I may not a need a firearms every day to defend myself, but if I do need it, I need it. Just like fire insurance on my house. Additionally, the fact that a population is armed is a deterrent to tyrannical government and genocide.

Aside from these serious uses for firearms, they have plenty of recreational uses. There are many different kinds of competitive shooting sports, many of which are Olympic events. There's informal target shooting. There is hunting, both for subsistence and recreation. In Pennsylvania alone there are over 1 million deer hunters. Deer hunting is such a part of Pennsylvania's culture that much of the state shuts down on opening day of buck season. (Just think of the impact on the economy if the sales of hunting-related equipment ceased.)

Whole Lotta Moz

The folks over at Mozilla have been working hard and it shows. Today, they released new versions of all three of their major projects, Mozilla 1.7.3, MozillaFirefox 1.0PR, and MozillaThunderbird 0.8.

You know what to do.

Bye bye, Nextel

I finally got rid of my company-issued Nextel phone today. I had the same number since I started on 10/9/00. Since I transferred to my new job, I've used it exactly twice, so my boss was ok with me turning it in. I have a personal Verizon cell phone that I can use during one of my infrequent excursions from the office. I was tired of carrying around two cell phones.

I'll have had the Verizon phone for two years this December, so I've had a good chance to try them and Nextel side-by-side. IMHO, Verizon wins hands-down. They have much better network coverage, at least in my area. I always thought that Nextel's Direct Connect was a stupid gimmick, anyway. The clarity of the walkie-talkie feature was never as good as a regular telephone connection. The walkie-talkie feature's only advantage was that since the calls never left Nextel's own network they gave you unlimited minutes. If Nextel wanted to, it would be easy enough to just give you unlimited in-network phone calls. AAMOF, Verizon started doing just that within the last year or two.

DING DONG THE BAN IS DEAD!

As of September 13, 2004, the provisions of Public Law 103-322, the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994, covering semiautomatic assault weapons and large capacity ammunition feeding devices are no longer in effect. The regulations implementing these provisions also are no longer in effect.

Specifically, there is no longer a Federal prohibition on the manufacture, transfer, and possession of semiautomatic assault weapons and large capacity ammunition feeding devices.

Source: http://www.atf.gov/firearms/saw-factsheet.htm

A Clippy for CBS

Three years ago

It was three years ago today that Al Qaeda terrorists attacked the USA. People keep referring to the attack as a "tragedy." No. It would have been a tragedy had an airplane accidentally flown into the WTC or the Pentagon. What happened on 9/11/01 was an atrocity.

We may not have captured OBL but we've got him and his followers on the run (those who aren't worm food yet, anyway). We've gotten rid of one middle eastern despot who aided and abetted terrorists (don't forget Hussein paid $25K to the families of Palestinian suicide bombers), and we've got one other terrorist sponsoring state -- Iran -- surrounded and feeling the heat. Moreover, we're drawing a lot of radical Muslim terrorists from their hidey holes to Iraq and killing them there, rather than in Downtown, USA. We may have a long way to go before we stamp out radical Muslim terrorism, but we've made good progress in only three years. This isn't going to be some quick in and out job, it needs a long term commitment.

Client visit

This morning I did my quarterly visit to one of my clients. While there, I installed the latest Critical Hotfix for their Windows 2003 file server, plus updated versions of imlib and the Linux kernel on their SuSE 9.0 mail server. I wanted to install an updated version of CommuniGate Pro, but ran into dependency problems. So, it looks like I'll be upgrading the box to SuSE 9.1 in the next month or so.

After finishing at their office, I went and did a site survey at the new building they are moving into within the next month. The new office space will be less spread out than their current layout, which will faciliate running new Ethernet and telephone cables. We'll have to punch through one cinder block wall and then run some LAN and phone cabling along the baseboards in part of the new site, however. That part of the building is being converted into workspace from warehouse space, and has a commensurately high ceiling. It'l be a lot easier (not to mention safer for us) to run it near the floor than twenty or so feet up in the rafters.

Jewish Haiku

After the warm rain
the sweet smell of camellias.
Did you wipe your feet?
*****
Her lips near my ear,
Aunt Sadie whispers the name
of her friend's disease.
*****
Looking for pink buds
to prune, the old moyel
wanders among his flowers.
*****
Today I am a man.
Tomorrow I will return
to the seventh grade.
*****
Harsh Scrabble discord--
someone has placed "putzhead" on
a triple word score.
*****
Testing the warm milk
on her wrist, she sighs softly.
But her son is forty.
*****
The sparkling blue sea
reminds me to wait an hour
after my sandwich.
*****
Tea ceremony--
fragrant steam perfumes the air.
Try the cheese Danish.
*****
Lacking fins or tail
the gefilte fish swims with
great difficulty.
*****
Yom Kippur-- Forgive
me, Lord, for the Mercedes
and all that lobster.
*****
My nature journal --
today, I saw some trees and birds.
I should know the names?
*****
Like a bonsai tree,
your terrible posture at
my dinner table.
*****
Beyond Valium
the peace of knowing one's child
is an internist.
*****
Jews on safari --
map, compass, elephant gun,
hard sucking candies.
*****
Coroner's report --
"The deceased, wearing no hat,
caught his death of cold."
*****
The same kimono
the top geishas are wearing:
got it at Loehmann's.
*****
The sparrow brings home
too many worms for her young.
"Force yourself," she chirps.
*****
Jewish triathlon:
gin rummy, then contract bridge,
followed by a nap.
*****
"Can't you just leave it?"
the new Jewish mother asks -
umbilical cord.
*****
The shivah visit:
so sorry about your loss.
Now back to my problems.
*****
Our youngest daughter,
our most precious jewel.
Hence the name, Tiffany.
*****
Mom, please! There is no
need to put that dinner roll
in your pocketbook.
*****
Seven-foot Jews in
the NBA slam-dunking!
My alarm clock rings.
*****
Concert of car horns
as we debate the question
of when to change lanes.
*****
Sorry I'm not home
to take your call. At the tone
please state your bad news
*****
Is one Nobel Prize
so much to ask from a child
after all I've done?
*****
Today, mild shvitzing.
Tomorrow, so hot you'll plotz.
Five-day forecast: feh
*****
Left the door open.
for the Prophet Elijah.
Now our cat is gone.
*****
Yenta. Shmeer. Gevalt.
Shlemiel. Shlimazl. Tochis.
Oy! To be fluent!
*****
Quietly murmured
at Saturday services,
Yanks 5, Red Sox 3.
*****
A lovely nose ring --
excuse me while I put my
head in the oven.
*****
Hard to tell under
the lights--white Yarmulke or
male-pattern baldness

A better approach

Chaska, MN is a city offering wireless broadband Internet access to its residents. Unlike the proposed plan for Philly, in which the service would be free, Chaska.net charges for its service; $15.99/month for residential customer and $24.99/month for businesses. The city is using its access to things like utility polls and their water tower to reduce costs.

Should Philly go ahead with this free plan, it's going to come to be regarded as yet another "entitlement," which is the last thing this cash-strapped city needs.

Chicago Mayor Unveils Surveillance Plan

Chicago Mayor Unveils Surveillance Plan: "Chicago Mayor Unveils Surveillance Plan

By TARA BURGHART Associated Press Writer

CHICAGO (AP) - More than 2,000 surveillance cameras in public places would be tied in to a network that would use sophisticated software to spot emergencies or suspicious behavior under a plan announced Thursday by Mayor Richard Daley.

'Cameras are the equivalent of hundreds of sets of eyes. They are the next best thing to having police officers stationed at every potential trouble spot,' Daley said.

Officials said the bulk of the cameras already are in use at O'Hare International Airport, on the city's transit lines and in public housing, parks and schools, along with 30 police are using to try to curb violent crime. An additional 250 surveillance cameras still to be bought will raise the number available to more than 2,000. Locations for the new cameras have not been determined."

Hello, Big Brother. As Kim duTiot notes, Daley is a turd. Actually, he's worse than that but i'll restrain myself, lest I burst a blood vessel.

THR is back online!

My main online BBS haunt, The High Road, is back online after being down for a few days due to a Hurricane Frances induced power outage. Woo hoo!

Now, hopefully Ivan won't cause any further grief to the folks down in Florida.

Wireless testing

This afternoon I used the Netgear wireless 802.11g card (in .11b mode) and the NetNearU wireless router for my Internet access. The WAN port was connected to an unrestricted network, separate from our regular corporate LAN. Results were mixed.

Overall, connection speed was fine. I had several times where Thunderbird lost its connection to my mail server, though. I haven't pinned it down to the router, NIC, or XP yet.

I did not stress the connection much at all, rather, I just used it for web surfing and email. So, any of the components should have been able to handle the load without problems. I have the router configured to hand out only 4 IPs, so it's not like I had a bunch of freeloaders on the connection. Nor should signal be a problem, since my laptop and the router are only a couple of feet apart.

More testing to follow.

Foxnews: Congress Will Let AWB Die

Congress to Let Assault Weapons Ban Expire

Wednesday, September 08, 2004

WASHINGTON — Congress will not vote on an assault weapons ban due to expire Monday, Republican leaders said Wednesday, rejecting a last-ditch effort by supporters to renew it.

"I think the will of the American people is consistent with letting it expire, so it will expire," Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (search), R-Tenn., told reporters.

Read the whole story here.

It's going to die, finally. I expect that we'll need to fight a renewal after the election, no matter who wins. But in the interim I'm celebrating -- I ordered a folding stock for my AK. :-)

Free Space Optics

I just got out of a meeting in which the topic of "free space optics" came up. We were discussing wireless ways to get from our network to a customer who for whatever reason, we can't run coax to. FSO is apparently one of the options we're looking at. In essence, FSO allows you to transmit high bandwidth via lasers over a range of about 500M to 1Km. It's an alternative to radio, and operates in an unlicensed portion of the EM spectrum.

Pretty neat.

Test

Testing, testing.

Problems

Jeezus. It took about 3 hours for me to be able to get my last post up. I kept getting Blogger errors. I'm going to try the post-by-email feature to see if I can avoid further instances of this.

Laptop updates

I switched over my Dell laptop to Mozilla Firefox and Thunderbird from the full Moz suite this morning. The individual apps seem a bit more responsive, but in the event I run into major difficulties I left Moz 1.7.2 onboard.

A neat extension I am trying is the Firefox Toolbar. Think of it as the Google Toolbar but for Firefox instead of IE. There are several variants; I installed the version with tie-ins to Blogger. Since it includes a search box, I need to see if it's possible to hide the Google box that Firefox has by default.

In addition to the software, I was able to get ahold of a Netgear WG511 802.11g (and .11b) network card. Since the wireless routers I'm testing support 802.11g, I needed some way to hook up to them without relying on 802.11b support. Aside from that, the 802.11b card I was using was my personally-owned Linksys, which I'd rather leave at home.

It'll be interesting to see if I can get the Netgear card to speak to my Linksys wireless router at home with WEP enabled.

Five days to go ...

... until the federal "Assault Weapons Ban" fades off into the sunset. It's been a long ten years that Americans have had their rights infringed by this oppressive piece of crap. For those who think that we'll now have machineguns easily available, think again. The AWB as enacted in 1994 banned from further production and importation certain semiautomatic -- not fully-automatic (machineguns) -- firearms. Firearms were classified as AWs by name and/or by certain prohibited, largely cosmetic features.

At the time it was enacted, supported claimed that AWs were the preferred weapons of criminals. This is bullshit. Try hiding an Kalashnikov or AR-15 under your coat before going down to rip off the local quickie mart. Criminals like guns they can conceal easily. AAMOF, according to ATFE, the most-traced firearms used in crimes are Smith & Wesson revolvers, which have been in production in substantially the same form since 1899.

In any event, criminals favor automobiles as their preferred getaway vehicle. Should we ban cars that go faster than 35 MPH? Of course not. Cars are tools used by criminals. Guns are tools used by criminals. Both of them have both good and bad uses but in and of themselves are neither good nor evil. We punish misuse of cars but don't even consider banning them or restricting access to them, except for people who misuse them. And a hell of a lot more people are injured in cars than with firearms.

What the AWB attempted to do was to cut off Americans' access to military-style firearms. In this, it violates the clear intentions of the Framers, who intended the Second Amendment to be a "reset button" for a government run amok. (The "well-regulated militia" referred to in the Second Amendment is not the National Guard, which didn't come into existence until over a century following the ratification of the Bill of rights. "Well regulated" in this context means "properly functioning.")

We talk about checks and balances between the legislative, judicial, and executive branches of government. The Second Amendment is the check and balance between the people and the government.

By attempting to reduce Americans' ability to resist a tyrannical government, those legislators who voted for the AWB sought to insulate themselves from culpability for any egregious actions they might take. I regard them as traitors to their constituents and the oath they took upon entering office to uphold and defend the constitution of the United States.

Constitutionality aside, even the radical antigun Violence Policy Center has admitted that the AWB has had no effect on crime. The AWB can't even pass a fairly-applied rational basis analysis test of Constitutionality, much less strict scrutiny.

As someone with more than a passing interest in firearms and ballistics, I know what a misused firearm can do. What we need to do as a society is to keep guns out of the hands of those who misuse them and the best way to do that is to reduce the amount of misuse to begin with. Focusing on the inanimate object to reduce its misuse is dumb. E.g., we don't blame the car when a drunk driver hurts someone. We shouldn't blame guns when someone is shot with one.

Thankfully, in five days the AWB will be history. I expect the antis to try again to come up with a replacement. Unfortunately I am not so sure they will be unsuccessful. So, I do plan to go buy something at my favorite gun shop on 9/14/04. I'll get a nasty, evil assault weapon with all the toppings and metaphorically flip Dianne Feinstein the bird.

Overstock.com running SUSE

Overstock.com has a saying: "It's All About the O." But for Vice President of Technology Shawn Schwegman and his IT staff, it's all about the SUSE.

After closing last year out at $300 million in sales, the company is shooting for $600 million this year. Schwegman says he is prepping for further anticipated growth. "We just want to keep doubling every year for as long as we can," he said. "With that kind of growth, we're trying to stay as far ahead of the curve as we can."

Obviously, Overstock has huge technology needs. How best to keep the Web site running and running without hang-ups?

The company has used Linux in some form since the beginning. At first, it was Red Hat combined with HP-UX, but Schwegman realized early on that with Overstock.com's forecasted growth it would be advantageous to explore more possibilities with Linux. "We made the jump and commitment to be 100% Linux, as much as possible, especially with our production environment," he said.

Schwegman did a heavy bake-off between the different Linux flavors, putting them through the "wringer," looking at support and pricing, and testing load capacities. "We'd emulate our existing load and check the performance and response times."

That, coupled with a "general feel from the administration standpoint" led to a decision for SUSE -- even before Novell bought it.

Full story here.

Labor Day Weekend

I hope my American readers had a great Labor Day weekend. My grandfather was in town and got to see Amanda for the first time. Also, one of my uncles came up from Arlington, VA, so we had a mini reunion for my mom's side of the family.

Floppy accident

Practice safe computing practices, not like these guys.

:-O

XP SP2 slowing down Dell Inspirons?

According to this story from ZD.net.uk, SP2 is slowing XP Home on Dell Inspiron laptops quite a bit, by up to 10x. Good grief.

So far I haven't noticed any adverse affects on my Compaq Presario 710US running XP Pro, but I have to admit I haven't really wrong it out to see if it's broken any apps other than Firefox or Thunderbird. I really ought to do that in my copious (cough, cough) free time.

Firefox Toolbar

I ran across the Firefox Toolbar this morning. It's an analogue to the Google Toolbar for IE, but as you can tell by the name, this is for Mozilla Firefox. I'll have to try it out.

Ruger Police Service Six

Last night I went to Surplus City for the first time since Amanda was born. He had a few neat toys and I came home with a Ruger Police Service Six in .357 Magnum. This is one of a bunch of wheelguns Century Arms has been bringing back into the US from Canada, like the 3" GP-100 I have.

The *Six (Security, Service, and Speed) revolvers were Ruger's first foray into the centerfire double action revolver market, and first became available around 1970, give or take a year. They were fine, rugged, easy to maintain, and accurate wheelguns.

Ruger discontinued the *Sixes in 1988, but a lot of revolver fans still like them. They are a bit more svelte than the GP-100, which replaced them, and handle better, IMO. The *Sixes can have very smooth actions once broken in. Back in the 1980s my dad had a 6" blued Security Six with which he shot in bullseye comptetition. Between thousands of live rounds, God knows how many dry firings, and a Wolff spring kit, the action on it was slick as snot.

The Security Six had adjustable sights while the Service and Speed Sixes had fixed sites. The Speed Six had a round butt grip frame, while the Service Six had a square butt.

My "new" gun is very good shape overall. It's got some cosmetic dings and scratches but since it's made from stainless steel, they should be fairly easy to fix. The action is smooth and will only get better with use. The action locks up nice and tight, with no end shake. It came with a set of Pachymar Presentation rubber grips.

A picture of a Service Six can be just like mine can be found here. A range report will follow after I get it out and shoot it.

Tell 'em Zell!

I missed Sen. Zell Miller's speech last night but read the transcript this morning. Holy moley did he tear into his fellow Dems:

"While young Americans are dying in the sands of Iraq and the mountains of Afghanistan, our nation is being torn apart and made weaker because of the Democrat's manic obsession to bring down our commander-in-chief," Miller told convention participants at Madison Square Garden.

"Like you, I ask which leader it is today that has the vision, the willpower and, yes, the backbone to best protect my family? The clear answer to that question has placed me in this hall with you tonight. For my family is more important than my party."

You can read the whole thing here.

One Marine's response to Michael Moore

...here. Hah!

Gmail Labels

I've been using Gmail for a little while now, using it to receive several email lists. One of its features is the lack of folders. Everything is dumped into your inbox. However, you can "Label" messages. After creating a Label, it will appear in a list in the left-hand pane of your Gmail windows. You can then click on a Label name and display only those messages that are labeled appropriately.

The effect is essentially the same as having folders, with one key difference. You can apply more than one Label to a message. While you can always copy messages to more than one folder in a conventional email client, this results in duplication. Gmail's approach lets you sort messages like you can with folders, but allows the same message (not copies of it) to reside in more than one "folder," in effect.

Philly to go wireless?

Today's Metro, a daily free newspaper distributed at train stations and bus stops, has a story reporting a proposed plan to cover Philadelphia with wifi hotspots, apparently to be run by the city. There's a $10M price tag quoted for it. As yet, no word on whether it will be "free"* or if users will have to pay. Should the plan be implemented it would make Philadelphia the world's largest hotspot.

Personally, I have my doubts that the city could pull it off comptently. Governments can sometimes drive innovation by the private sector or academia, with the best example being the Internet. However, government attempts at putting similar programs in place are almost invariably plagued by poor implementation, shoddy work, and cost overrruns.


* In the words of Robert A. Heinlein, TANSTAAFL, or there ain't no such thing as a free lunch. Somebody has to foot the bill, whether subscribers or taxpayers.

Edit: Apparently, AP has picked up this story.