Another Word for Nerd

SBC has finished their acquisition of AT&T, and they’ve bastardized the classic “Death Star” logo 8-(

In a repeat of problems I had a few weeks ago, the iMac G5 refused to power back on (even using the internal reset/power button) after I turned it off to rearrange some cables. Unlike last time, I’m now unable to get it to power on at all.

I’ve boxed it up so I can take it to the Apple Store at the Galleria tomorrow and see what’s wrong. Hopefully its something simple like the power supply; I already had to replace the midplane (motherboard) on this system back in March due to faulty capacitors.

Until the iMac is fixed, I’m stuck on my 800Mhz iBook G4.

Google has announced (and released) Google Analytics, the result of their purchase of Urchin a while back. Basically, it’s free web statistics software, for sites with less than 5M pageviews/month.

I’ve set it up (along with Measure Map) on both this site and SunHELP. It will be interesting to see how the results from each service compare to the stats I pull with webalizer every night.

Good news: I was just handed a matched pair of AMD Opteron 248 CPUs.

Bad news: The cheapest motherboard I can find (socket 940) is $200.

Anybody know of any single-CPU Socket 940 motherboards with 8x AGP for less than $200?

I’m three chapters into Practical Common LISP, and I think I’m in love. I wish I’d learned this language ten years ago.

One of the best writeups I’ve seen on the topic: Linux is Not Windows.

My dedicated Asterisk voice-over-IP PBX server arrived yesterday; it’s an old Dell Optiplex GX100 (small form factor case), 500Mhz/128M/6G with 10/100 Ethernet, CD-ROM, and two PCI slots. I put my clone X101P PCI FXO card in one of the slots, added 128M of PC100 RAM that I had lying around, and the machine is done! I’ve installed Asterisk@Home, and will be setting up and testing things at home over the next few days before I do the final switchover and plug the box into our POTS line from SBC. I’ll probably do the switchover this weekend; we have lots of other stuff around the house that needs to be done first.

I’ve currently got one Grandstream BT101 native IP phone and two Cisco ATA-188 analog (“normal phone”) adapters. I’ll put the BT101 on my desk, an ATA-188 on Amy’s desk (so she can use the same phone she’s had for a couple of years), and put the second ATA in either the kitchen/den area or the bedroom. This only leaves me needing one more IP phone or ATA unless I decide to not use a softphone in the music room.

I’ve finally finished the WRT54G-based WDS mesh network that I’ll be using as the house VoIP backbone. This also lets me avoid ever having to run Cat5 anywhere in the house; if I need non-wireless access somewhere, I just add another WRT54G.

I’ve got four nodes right now (a v2.0, 2.2, 3.0, and 3.1); I think that provides more than adequate wireless coverage for the entire house (and for a 2-3 house radius in all directions).

The computer room node has two wired clients (my iMac and Amy’s PC), and the music room node has the Mac mini, my Windows PC, and the Dell Linux machine (fileserver and backups). The bedroom node will provide Ethernet for the TiVo and VoIP phone. Kitchen/den node will just provide IP for the VoIP phone for now.

I’ll eventually replace everything but the main (computer room) node with Linksys WTR54G “Travel Routers”, as they’re tiny and less obtrusive than a normal WRT54G. They’re very similar to Apple’s Airport Express unit, just $40 cheaper (and they’ll run the Sveasoft Talisman firmware, like my current boxes).

I scanned some more historical UNIX-related advertisements from some early-90s issues of UNIXWorld Magazine.

Tonight I replaced my year-old Linksys WRT54Gv2 with a brand-new WRT54Gv3, running the Sveasoft Talisman 1.0.5 replacement firmware.

I’ve also got a WRT54Gv2.2 in the music room, bridging the systems in there (Mac mini, AMD Windows machine, Dell SC420 running Linux) to the rest of the network.

With the prior v2 ‘54G, I never got more than 1 megabyte/sec transfer rate between the routers. When I upgraded to the v3, that has now jumped to a rock-solid 2.2 megabytes/sec (tested with a 200M file).

I’ll probably make the old v2 unit another wireless bridge in the bedroom, for when I finally get the DirecTiVo in there connected to the network so I can dump shows to the Mac here in the computer room.