I lost my fucking IP lease. I should have thought that a transparent proxy is going to cause the cable modem to think a new NIC is connected. Bah.
Stupid, stupid me.
Now I’m sniffing through a hub, but the address has changed.
Lots done around here today. First off, I change the firewall. Went from OpenBSD 3.3 to 3.4, to a Celeron 300a (at 450Mhz), new NICs, the works. Hopefully this will cut down on the outages I’ve been having. Big problem with this, though, is my public interface IP changed. It’s now 68.60.146.109. DNS changes have been put into place, and we’ll see how things go. Over the last week I’ve also finished adding entries to the recipes section. As I get more that I commonly use, I’ll add them, but that’s all for now.
So, I did it. I just ordered the parts to rebuild my old PC.
No, I’m not switching away from Macs, it’s just been sort-of mandated that I get a Windows Server 2003 cert by the end of 1Q2004. So, I need a test machine.
It’s not a bad deal… From Newegg I was able to get a AMD Athlon XP2500+ CPU, Asus A7N8X-VM (nForce 2 IGP) Micro-ATX motherboard, 512MB of DDR400 RAM, and a (free) t-shirt for ~$268.
I figure I’ll assemble the machine into the Doggie Case which housed by old high-end PC. It’ll end up on the rack down in the basement, admin’d via Terminal Service / Remote Desktop. One nice thing, it’ll give me a chance to play with *nix / OS X / Windows integration at home.
Oh, I just realized I haven’t done much of an update lately. So, what’s been going on with me? Well, I had a really good time at
Tonight I have to give a presentation in class as part of the final project. I’m kinda nervous, but I generally know the material. My biggest concern is running over time, because I have a lot of info. I’m off work tomorrow, so I’m going to try and get the paper for class done. It’s not due until the 18th, but the instructor asked that we get them in earlier so he has more time to read them. I’m going to try to stay in his good graces. I *think* I have the structure of the paper generally done, I just need to write the actual words now. And bibliography. Whee!
Hrm, yeah, that’s it for now. I’m going to go think about eating the indian food I brought for lunch. Mmm….spicy!
Spent a bit of time today updating dingleberrypie.com. Most of the work was behind the scenes stuff. I’ve still got some more scheduled jobs to work on, including a problem with automated log rotation, where I want to be sure that the logs don’t rotate out before stats run against them, etc. Also, hopefully I’ll get around to adding properly done mail support so that I can transfer nuxx.net over as well. It’d be so much nicer… Although I do get a lot of spam… That could be kinda high traffic. MRTG should allow me to visualize this, though.
· Need to get MRTG running…
· Need to read Life with Qmail get qmail running…
· Need to lock down /admin in some fashion or another…
All,
I’ve been used to using Sonic Foundry’s Vegas for putting together cross-faded mix discs on my PC. However, since Vegas isn’t available on Mac, I’m looking for something else that will let you slide audio tracks on top of each other then adjust cross-fades easily. I’m thinking maybe Soundtrack, or just using Final Cut Express, exporting one big AIFF file, then breaking it into tracks.
Does anyone else have a better idea? I don’t want to go with something like Traktor as I’m not intending to do this realtime…
Okay, iTunes for Windows kicks ass. It’s *just* like iTunes for Mac. This makes me really happy… Although, if this had come out a year ago, I may not own a Mac right now. heh.
So, yes, if you have *lots* of music around, especially if you wish the library features of Winamp 3 actually worked, give iTunes for Windows a chance. It’s slick…
Oh, and there’s all the iTunes Music Store stuff that lets you buy CDs online reasonably.
After finally getting my office back together for tomorrow’s arrival of the G5, I thought I’d take some pictures of my office in it’s current state. Click here or on the picture below if you’d like to see some more photos. After I get the G5 in place (it’ll go on the aluminum slab that’s on the rack, but be placed where the G4 cube is) I’ll likely take some more photos, complete with detail of the aluminum stand that I made for the G5.
UPDATE: Whoops… I just realized that this post went to the wrong journal. It was supposed to be in
Wow, I feel like a true out and out rivethead tonight. I just spent the last hour filing, grinding, and wire brushing a 10″ x 20″ piece of 6061 aluminum alloy. See, when the G5 comes, it’s not going to fit on my shelf. Because of this I wanted to make a shelf for the G5, so it’ll sit nicely and look all pretty and stuff. My first choice was a nice 1/2″ thick piece of glass, but that ended up being too pricey; almost $70. Next, I consulted lowcostmetals.com after hearing about them from a friend. Turns out that I was able to get a appropriate sized piece of aluminum for $32, shipped. Not bad at all…
Anyway, the aluminum slab is a little scratched and was rather worn, so I decided to give it the most appropriate finish I could think of: brushed metal. Well, tonight I filed all the edges to nice 45°, put the wire wheel in my drill, and gave all the surfaces a fairly decent brush job, removing all but a couple of scratches. I think it looks pretty good…
As I was in the middle of finishing off the slab of aluminum, I remembered something I read online when reading the 6061 Aluminum Material Property Data Sheet. It seems that if one wishes to artificially age 6061 aluminum, it requires “350°F for 8 hours followed by air cooling” to reach T6 temper. Poking around Google, I found that T6 is a pretty hard temper, and I figured that it would be good to temper this stand, just to hopefully cut down on any more scratches.
So, in the oven it went. Seeing as this is a decent sized slab of metal, I’m going to give it 10 hours in a pre-heated oven. That means come 10:00am, I’m going to wake up, turn off the oven, and let the slab cool. Woo! Before placing the slab on the rack in the oven I made sure to wipe it down with isopropyl alcohol while wearing latex gloves. Hopefully that’ll eliminate any heat-assisted oxidation that may occur. If it does, I’ll just steel wool it off.
After the oven treatment I’m going to throw a number of coats of satin urethane (yes, the same stuff I used in my furniture) on the slab and call it done. Hopefully it’ll look nice… My tests with this urethane on various computer parts and metal pieces seemed to give a nice overall dulling, yet smoothing, effect, which is just what I’m looking for… So, we’ll see what happens. :)
Oh, maybe some pictures…
Well, just one, but that’s all right. I also put together the new table saw tonight, but I didn’t cut anything, so that part wasn’t as industrial as it could be… Woo! Italics…
Anyway, I think I’m done for tonight. I also slapped together some extra-low-cost shelves from Target to give me a place to put my vinyl and books in my office. Those worked out really well… Pics will be forthcoming, most likely after I get the office all put together. Finishing that will entail about two hours on my back, tying cables up above my head… Sort of the way I hurt my chest before. Sort of.
So, it turns out that the D-Link DWL-520 I won on eBay is actually the DWL-520c, which does not have the Prism2.5 chipset on it. See, I want a card with the Prism2 or Prism2.5 chipset, because then I can run it in hostap mode and have it be the 802.11b access point for my network. Nice idea, eh? wi0 on the firewall is a real interface and the access point and all…
But no…
Yet another thing that I try to do that I fsck up.
Gah.
On a side note, anyone interested in a good deal on a PCI-based 802.11b card? It’ll work great under Windows, just not OpenBSD.