Month: October 2006

Posted by arf in : Linux, Technology , trackback

So I have this MythTV box setup in my living room. Since I didn’t want to string a long network cable through the apartment, I decided to setup my pci wireless card in it.

I worked for a while but due to some incompatibilities in the Linux 2.6 kernel that comes with Fedora Core 4 and the opensource ndiswrapper project, the computer would occasionally lock up. For more on this check out the Fedora distro page at the wiki.
So I decided to go buy one of the Linksys wireless game adapters (WGA54G) from Best Buy. Now I realize that they are originally meant for use with an XBox or PlayStation 2, but they are essentially a wireless bridge.

You hook the device up to the network card and it clones the MAC address and grabs an IP from your wireless router.

What Linksys doesn’t tell you in the documentation is that if your router is set to G-Only then you will need to change it to mixed mode first or it won’t connect. Also they don’t bother to make it clear in the beginning that the device clones the MAC address of the wired-card. So, if you have the wireless MAC filter enabled on the router you will need the MAC address of the game adapter and the MAC address of the wired card in the list of enabled devices.

Oh and the only way to change the transmission mode of the game adapter from mixed mode to G-only is through the web interface on the adapter which you can only access through the device that is hooked up to the adapter.

Of course, none of this is in the user’s guide that comes with device. Good game Linksys, your team of technical writers gets a C- for thoroughness.

Posted by arf in : Web Development, Internet , add a comment

Many programmers love to put in easter eggs in their code. But one of the world’s largest websites has taken it a step further and added an easter egg to their website.

If you go to the Yahoo! website and click on the exclamation point in the Yahoo! logo, then you will be greeted with the yodeling Yahoo! sound file.  The sound file is actually a Macromedia Adobe shockwave flash file.  If you want the flash, you can grab it here.
Have you run across any interesting website easter eggs?

The times they are a-changin’ April 26, 2006

Posted by arf in : WordPress, Web Development, Internet , add a comment

As Bob Dylan said…

Well, if any of you come here often you will have noticed that the look of the site has changed.  I am now using the Regulus theme by Ben Gillbanks.

The reason for this is that I am now running the Widget plugin and needed a new theme that supported widgets.

For more on WordPress Widgets, browse on by the Automattic WordPress Widget page.

In the next couple of weeks I am going to be working on a widget or two.  I’ll post more on that soon.

The sky is falling, the sky is falling….oh wait February 21, 2006

Posted by arf in : Mac OS X, Internet , 1 comment so far

Yes, Virignia there is an Internet and according to the Chicken Littles of the security world it is falling down around your ears.

The problem appears to be that just like all of the pundits on Capitol Hill, who want the industry to take all of the blame for what young, impressionable children are watching on TV or playing on their Xbox, the computer security experts of the world want the industry to take the blame for all of the security problems that exist on computers.

Don’t get me wrong, some of the problems can and should be fixed by the developers.  There are some problems and holes that just can’t be anticipated by even the most astute user.

What I don’t agree with is that so many people are tending to view security through obfuscation as true security.  Take the current issue of Safari on Mac OS X.  According to an article at the SANS Internet Storm Center the root of the problem is that Safari has a default setting that allows the browser to have “safe” files opened automatically upon a successful download.

Now when this is checked someone can setup a file that masquerades as something else but is really an executable file, a veritable virus-in-graphics-clothing as it were.

The real solution of course is to change the default setting on the browser.  Of course this simple solution isn’t good enough for some people and they are suggesting that you move the Terminal.app program from it’s default location to somewhere else.  As if moving you door knob on your house from the standard middle-left to the bottom-right would keep a thief from picking the lock.

Face it folks, the time has come when, just like parents who have kids, that the users of the Internet need to stand forth and take responsibility for what they browse to, download, or e-mail on the Internet.

Buck up, Chicken Little, maybe people will wake up one day.  And yes, Virginia, it is possible to surf the Internet and not pickup spyware or viruses.

In the beginnging…

I am a native of Jesup, Georgia in the southeast United States of America. I lived here until graduation from Wayne County High School in 1990.

At this point I attended the University of Georgia until the spring of 1992, at which point I moved back home after realizing, at the behest of the UGA Registrar, that I had bitten off more than I could chew. I then proceeded to attend Coastal Georgia Community College, which was known then by the moniker Brunswick College. At this point I finally realized that what I wanted to study was computers.

Atfer graduating from Coastal Georgia Community College, I attended Valdosta State University where I obtained a degree in Computer Information Systems. I then applied for and won a staff position to run the IT Helpdesk at VSU.

Move along, Move along

During my time as a student at VSU, I met a wonderful woman named Pattie Gaylor. In late 2000 we began to date and in May of 2001 I asked for her hadn in marriage. After an extended engagement, we became husband and wife on July 31, 2004. We were married on Cherokee Lake in Wayne County at the lake house that belonged to the family of one of my best friends from high school.

Darkness descends

In The Phases of the Moon, William Butler Yeats wrote:

All thought becomes an image and the soul Becomes a body: that body and that soul Too perfect at the full to lie in a cradle, Too lonely for the traffic of the world: Body and soul cast out and cast away Beyond the visible world. All dreams of the soul

End in a beautiful man’s or woman’s body.

On August 16, 2004, due to complication stemming from illness, my wife and soulmate died.

Posted by arf in : HTML, Web Development , add a comment

So everybody wants there website to be useable by the handicapped. Which of course means that sooner or later, your boss is gonna walk into your office and say

“Johnson, I want my disabled nephew to be able to navigate our site by the end of business on Friday.”

Now if you have an atypical boss, this demand will be levied on Monday morning, first thing, but as we all know, most bosses don’t work that way.

So what is a poor web-slinger to do? Well, one thing you could try is a little-used HTML attribute called access keys. Access keys allow you to associate a hyperlink in a webpage with a particular keystroke on the keyboard.

Sounds cool, right? So why is it used so sparingly? The reason is because only a small handful of the available browsers support this attribute.

For more on access keys, visit the article Accesskeys: Unlocking Hidden Navigation, over at the excellent site A List Apart.