Kasperian Moving Parts

I don’t think I truly know what the words “vacation” or “relax” mean. Seriously. We’re visiting friends right now and I’ve taken the week off, conceivably to “relax”, or have a vacation. But I don’t know if I’d be able to relax if my life depended on it. When I’ve not been running around town with my little brood, or busily doing “fun” stuff, I’ve been trying to get caught up on my work e-mail, personal e-mail, and GSOC project, among other busy-work. Not exactly relaxing fare.

I’ve recently realized that this state is not necessarily a good one to exist in, and have become increasingly aware of an absence of rest, peace, and tranquility.

So, in an attempt to relax/vacation in the last couple of hours that I’ve had to myself, I’ve updated my facebook profile, set up a twitter account, caught up on my unread RSS feeds, caught up on unread mailing lists (not done with that one yet *sigh*), researched SRV DNS records, and having done those things, I feel anything but relaxed and/or vacationy.

I have a very out of focus picture in my mind of what relaxation/vacation should look like and it involves a couple of good books, a hammock, a bunch of trees, a cool breeze, and a distinct lack of technology. I think. But how do you actually pull that off? =:/

I switched from SUSE 10.3 to Kubuntu 8.04 (Hardy) just this evening. It’s always good to get a feel for how the various distros are doing. Anyway, it took me a bit of digging to figure out how to get the artwiz fonts (smoothansi, in particular) to work as my konsole font. Thanks to this article for the help! Couple of notes: Ubuntu Hardy doesn’t ship xfonts-artwiz anymore, apparently. Download them from this sourceforge project. The trick is to tell fontconfig to use bitmapped fonts by running sudo dpkg-reconfigure fontconfig-config.

I had THE most frustrating day yesterday. After a hellish night of not sleeping (darned cold!!), I wake up to find that my internet connection is totally borked. Looked at the router’s status page and it can’t get a DHCP address from my lovely ISP, Charter.net. Spent an hour on the phone with Charter’s completely unhelpful people. The guy actually said “gee, it’s kind of funny that you’re calling in with a Linksys router that isn’t able to get an IP address today–we’ve had a lot of Linksys router users call us today and tell us that.” I asked him if he didn’t think that that might be an indication of a problem in Charter’s setup and that it might be a non-coincidence that today, a bunch of Linksys-router-using people are calling?? He actually had the audacity to tell me that he thought it was Linksys’s fault… that maybe they pushed a firmware update out (HUH?!?! I have to flash my router to upgrade its firmware, dork), or maybe there’s just a bunch of Linksys routers that went belly-up on the same night (again, HUH?!?!?).

He tells me that since we can connect the Powerbook straight to the cable modem and it can get an IP address, that there’s something wrong with the Linksys router and that I will have to call Linksys for help. He says that Charter does not support any of its customers using routers at home. That’s cute. Like, you know… everyone just has one computer at home nowadays… ya dork! Now, I’ve not touched a thing on the cable modem or router in the 2 years that it’s been in my basement working fine with Charter, so I know for certain that I’ve not done anything to change things and that it must be something in Charter’s network that’s changed. The rude little Charter guy insisted that he was as high I could go for technical support and that customers weren’t allowed to talk to the network technicians. I didn’t but should have told him to bite me.

Oh, and the beauty of this is that I have Vonage for our phone provider, which means that the above conversation and the next one happened via cell phone. And the beauty of having a conversation from my house on a cell phone is that I live in the middle of a stinking forest and I get one bar of reception, if I’m lucky. So that makes for a nice, easy to understand phone call, especially when you’re talking… oh, I don’t know… to a very heavily-accented outsourced Indian support person.

So I hang up from the stupid Charter guy (I really hate Charter… did I mention that?) and call Linksys’s technical support number and start talking with a very heavily-accented outsourced Indian support person over my 1-bar cell phone connection in the middle of a stinking forest. She has a nice chat with me for a good half hour and asks me all kinds of questions about my home network and how many computers I have and how many of them are Windows (0), Mac (1), and Linux (5). Then she tells me that because my router is so old, she’s going to have to charge me $33 for helping me with it because it’s no longer covered under free technical support. So… just to clarify… because I paid $80 for a WRT54GS router 5 years ago and it’s still kicking strong, instead of… oh, I don’t know… a note of thanks or congratulations, I get a bill for $33 for her to help me get it working with Charter again. I told her that there’s no way in hell that I’m going to pay $33 for her help, which quickly led to the conclusion of that waste of a phone call. Unfortunately, seeing such amazingly awesome customer service by the likes of Moleskine and even Apple makes such patently horrific customer service as this really stand out. =:( Nice work, Linksys. I’ll be thinking more than twice about purchasing one of your products in the future.

Meanwhile, it’s like noon now and I’ve not yet been able to start work. That’s nice.

So after showering, eating, etc. I run up to the nearest Circuit City and plop down $49 for a new Linksys WRT54G2 wireless-G router, get it home, and connect it–foolishly thinking that it’ll work. Nope, same thing. About 10 minutes into my “Serenity now!!!” mental breakdown, I tried using the “MAC address clone” trick on the router. Sure enough, I entered in my Powerbook’s en0 MAC address and like magic, the new router is able to get an IP address from Charter’s DHCP servers. I run downstairs, pull the new router out, put the old WRT54GS back in, spend the next 10 minutes reconfiguring it and tell it to use the Powerbook’s MAC address, and sure enough, now it is able to get an IP address too. Needless to say, I’m taking the new router back and sticking with my old WRT54GS, thank you very much.

Gee, isn’t that a coincidence. Yep, there just must be a lot of people whose Linksys routers have died on them in the same day, ya moron.

What I think happened is that Charter rolled something out 2 nights ago so that their DHCP servers would stop handing out IP addresses to Linksys routers. Of course, Charter won’t admit to that.

So, now that I’ve officially been told by Linksys that they’re not going to lift a finger to help me if I have any problems with their router, I find this little lifehacker page that talks about upgrading your $60 router to a $600 router. I’d looked at the DD-WRT project before, but I was always a little nervous about bricking my router and having to go buy another one. With that fear now nicely removed, I figured that now’s a good time to see what DD-WRT can do. And DANG, I’m glad I did. There is so much more that I can configure with the DD-WRT interface than I ever could with the old Linksys interface. And the Web UI is so much more responsive! I’m totally impressed with it.

So, to sum up:

• Charter: you can totally bite me. As soon as I find another internet provider, you’re dumped like last week’s trash.
• Linksys: your products used to be totally awesome and then you outsourced your customer support, which means you might be saving money, but your customers are getting much less desirable support, at least as far as I’m concerned. You can sort of bite me.
• DD-WRT project: you guys totally rock.
• Forest that I live in: you rock except for making living with cell phones not fun.
• Not being able to start work until 4:30 pm because of all this: you TOTALLY suck. =:(

Oh HECK yes!!! I am SO buying this the split-second it comes out!!! Here’s an awesome review to boot!

I’ve been using Firefox 3, beta5 for a while now and am very much liking it. It’s crashed a fair bit, but that’s understandable being that it’s only a beta5. One thing that has bothered me, though, was that quite a few of my must-have extensions aren’t released for FF3 yet. TinyURL Creator, for one, is notably absent. Well, thanks to this page, I found a really simple workaround to enable (possibly dangerous and a bad idea to do) your old extensions in FF3:

All I had to do was to create a “extensions.checkCompatibility” boolean field in the Firefox about:config and set it to false. As you can guess, this disables the compatibility check for the extensions, and all the disabled incompatible extensions are enabled (with warning messages). Of course, this does not guarantee that the extension will work.

Yay! TinyURL Creator works again!

Hm, and while I’m on the subject of browser betas, Opera’s latest beta is looking really nice and finally works with the latest Flash plugin. And is it just me or is there a horrible vacuum where there should be some nice Firefox 3 themes? The only tolerable one I’ve found is the updated Qute theme.

KDE3, KDE4, Plasma, Twinview == Not Good

Originally uploaded by vanRijn

Dear Lazyweb,

This frustrates me and makes me all kinds of sad… For some reason, whenever I start my normal KDE3 session, plasma and KDE4 insists on starting up as well. So I get KDE3’s kicker and KDE4’s plasma stacked, which is less than fun and not quite useful. Also, I can’t get plasma/kwin4/kde4 to play nicely with twinview. I have an external monitor that runs @1280×960 and my laptop screen that runs @1280×800. I think it’s confusing plasma, and it looks like this. =:(

Anyone know why or how to make it better?

I’ve never had an eye exam before today, but I am a HUGE fan of Brian Regan and absolutely LOVE his skit about going to the eye doctor. It is totally hilarious! What I was not prepared for, however, was how accurate his observations were! I thought that he must have some nutty eye doctor, but he was right on, which made it even worse for me, as I was sitting in the eye exam chair, trying way too hard not to laugh. If you’ve never seen Brian’s eye doctor skit, you totally owe it to yourself to watch it. NOW!

Oh, and as an added bonus to the thoroughly entertaining morning, I found out that I have pretty durned good eyesight for a staring-at-the-computer-screen-for-12+hours-per-day guy! 20/20 in my right eye and pretty close to that in my left.

And now for something completely different…

That’s right, folks! If yer lookin’ for a big hole to throw $300 into, just go out and buy yerself a 32″ RCA CRT TV! That’s what I did just 2 short years ago, and shore enuff, the only useful purpose this monstrous beast now serves is to beep like a Geiger counter when it’s plugged in and take up a lot of space. If it works for me, it can work for you too!

Now, seriously, this sucketh mightily. I was toying with the idea of going out and plunking down a large amount of $CURRENCY for one of them new-fangled big-screen, flat-panel dealies–especially being that the PS3’s graphics are totally wasted on the old CRTs we have had, but it just KILLS me to be looking at spending that much money for something that I don’t even watch all that often. Also, I’m totally not with it as far as what technology to go with (LCD versus rear projection versus <I don’t even know what else is out there>).

So, dear reader, what would you recommend for a good quality, not horribly expensive, something that will last a long time, television?

I have discovered how to save millions on Christmas and birthday gifts. Just have something shipped to you that is packed in bubble wrap. The “something” goes to you, and the bubble wrap keeps the wife and kids entertained for hours!