While I’m futzing around with hardware stuff, I want to make sure that I’ve gushed appropriately about OpenWRT and the super-router my $50 Linksys has now become.

Here’s the ping to my a work server:

10 packets transmitted, 10 packets received, 0% packet loss
round-trip min/avg/max = 8.33/12.443/21.739 ms

And here’s the ping while I’m rsyncing at 230Kbps (off of theoretical 300Kbps upstream):

10 packets transmitted, 10 packets received, 0% packet loss
round-trip min/avg/max = 9.119/51.399/95.571 ms

Oh, and now here’s while uploading at 250Kbps and downloading at 1.2Mbps:

10 packets transmitted, 10 packets received, 0% packet loss
round-trip min/avg/max = 11.564/34.727/51.772 ms

About a 20X+ improvement over performance w/o traffic shaping. It’s the difference between my shell being unusable and being productive while I’m transferring.

Now this is scary. I’m at 4 x 250GB currently. Was hoping to have 1-2TB drives before I needed to upgrade.

/dev/sda7             682G  499G  184G  74% /home

Now if only I had some good cataloguing software…

2.6 kernel compilation notes:

• Debian Kernel Compile How To – read this for which dependency packages to update. Really useful
• rm /usr/include/asm && ln -s /usr/include/asm /usr/src/linux/include/asm-i386 – thank self later
• Supermount – here’s a guy who has the latest 2.6.8+ patches
• New supermount hint

Oh wait, I have autofs already installed and set up. It just can’t see my cdrom drive properly. Hmm… That’s good b/c I can’t find a 2.6.8 supermount patch

• Is Supermount really needed?
• Autofs Automounter HOWTO

I’ve been working w/ Linux for 10 years now. Why are such seemingly simple things still so hard?

• Posting to Drupal from VIM – this, I like, but I’d go further (file interface for entries that checks for changes automatically… hmm, let me go code a bit [woo for Transparent Interfaces])
• Beautify Instiki – apply CSS directly; see also: Gmail skinning
• TextMate looks interesting (blog, wiki)
• Michael Kinsley on Slate vs. the L.A. Times, Calling a Lie a Lie, and Opinion Journalism as Indulgence – interesting that Halperin Memo is controversial for calling it as it is
• Ahh, NYTimes coverage had realtime analysis, as did the Christian Science Monitor’s ‘Diablog’

Art Party going on tonight. Looks like it’s going to be a big bash. Should be fun to catch old friends.

• First Drive: Golf V GTI – Wolfsburg to Paris – luckily there’s at least a year for me to restrain my impulse to buy. That and I still think the front end is very un-VW
• Overlap between faceted classification and business rule systems?
• Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth: Center for Private Equity and Entrpreneurship: Articles (see also: their glossary)
• techInterview – Answers to technical interview questions – hey this is a fun (and potentially useful, I suppose) read
• hack a day – another Weblogs inc. blog. Looks cool

• Josh Marshall on the last question of the debate:
  

  This is all of a piece. In the Bush world you never admit
  mistakes. The only mistakes the president can think of are the times he
  appointed people who do admitted mistakes — who put reality above
  loyalty to the president.

  No one likes admitting mistakes. And it’s often especially difficult for public officials to do so. But recognizing
  mistakes — on the inside, if not for public consumption — is how
  you prevent mistakes from metastasizing into disasters. Which all
  explains a great deal about how we got where we are now in Iraq.

• mefi discussion: Vice President Cheney declares the no-wmd report justifies war – some really good points and a few guffaws in there. Saw a student screening of f9/11 on campus, have the DVD coming in, will have to post the ‘WMD’ montage…
• NationStates is a free nation simulation game. Build a nation and run it according to your own warped political ideals. Create a Utopian paradise for society’s less fortunate or a totalitarian corporate police state. Care for your people or deliberately oppress them. Join the United Nations or remain a rogue state. It’s really up to you.
• Need Sum Wood? – The rumours on the internets are true!

• Treo 650 vs Treo 600 Photo Comparison – the only thing the 650 doesn’t have is multi-threaded browsing/msging (will have to wait for Cobalt for a Palm-phone to do that) and possibly crippled BT for the Sprint version (we’ll have to see)
• Dred Scott = Roe v. Wade – oh. more proof that these guys are fuckin’ nuts
• Rep. Time Ryan is a Good Dude [5.5MB MOV] – you guys have someone to be proud of, Ohio. If only there were more of them
• Derrida dead (decomposing vs deconstructing?), noted on Wikipedia
• “I don’t need the cash, I’d prefer to just change the world.” – that about sums it up, right there (otoh, cash as conversion to units of time… a certain amount of that is nice)

Need some realtime fact checking (ooh, distributed realtime fact checking app would be fun) for this debate…

• Daily Reason to Dispatch Bush – err, if you need more mistakes (Bush couldn’t think of 3, except for the appointments who wrote books about him I guess)
• U.S. judge blocks partial-birth abortion ban – Kerry was against it because there was no health exception
• Researchers Cite Stem Cell Shortage – The finding that only 11 cell lines are currently available instead of more than 70 led to a call for lifting the restrictions and development of new cell lines.
• LCV’s 2003 Presidential Report Card – GWB gets an F, the first ever the LCV has given to a president (34yr history)
• The Bush Record on the Environment – ‘George W. Bush will go down as America’s worst environmental president,’ writes Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., senior attorney for the Natural Resources Defense Council, and one of the nation’s top environmentalists, in Rolling Stone (12/11/03).
• Factcheck.org: Bush Still Fudging the Numbers on Kerry’s Tax Votes – The Bush-Cheney campaign released a television ad August 23 accusing Kerry of casting “98 votes for tax increases.” The number is an improvement on Bush’s earlier claim that Kerry cast 350 votes for “higher taxes,” which we described as inflated. But even the new, reduced total is padded
• In New Attacks, Bush Pushes Limit on the Facts – From the beginning of the year, the White House has charted new ground with the sweep of its negative campaigning, starting with an $80 million wave of attack advertisements directed at Senator John Kerry that began the moment he effectively won his party’s nomination last spring.
• Scorched-Earth Strategy – After a terrible week for his campaign, Bush has one agenda between now and Election Day: attack Kerry

A friend mentioned I edit (post to, I assume) my blog than all the rest of the people on her blogroll combined. I’m probably not as much of a junkie as the people on my feedreader, but it is one of the advantages of editing the blog through vim. Sending off a missive is just a xterm-switch away. The next thing is to track up the total amount of day spent clicking away at this thing, but it’s most likely less than the amount of time I spend walking between meetings and offices, so I don’t feel too bad about it.