behold, the mighty tower of diet coke. i don’t know how long this will last, but it seems like quite the challenge. i left a couple of cases at work and i’m whittling away at those during the day time. the rest of these cases of diet coke are now sitting on two shelves in our pantry.

i love fog. i don’t know why, but every time i see it, i get flashbacks to my childhood when i would wake up early in the morning, see the fog, and dash outside to see if i can see across the street and see my friend’s house.

this morning the ride to work was fun driving through the thick fog. now, if there was some way to make it really foggy, but not so cold…

sometimes i think that knowing too much can only complicate your life. such is the case with my wireless network at home. we bought a roughly 10 year old house about a year ago and back then it was not standard practice to wire the house for ethernet. ten years from now, wiring the house for ethernet may fall out of fashion as wireless technologies improve, but in the meantime, wired networks are still by far the easiest way to get fast performance in your network.

+----------------+     +-------------------+      +--------------+
|  Speedstream   |_____| AirLink101 AR670W |   ___| Dell Desktop |
| 6520 DSL Modem |     | Wireless N Router |___\  |  EDIMAX PCI  |
+----------------+     +-------------------+      |  Wireless G  |
                         \               \        +--------------+
                         _\              _\
                        \               \
                         \               \
                   +-----------+   +------------+     +--------------------+
                   |  Linksys  |   |  Buffalo   |_____|   D-Link DGS-2208  |
                   | WRTSL54GS |   | WHR-HP-G54 |     | 8-Port 10/100/1000 |
                   |   dd-wrt  |   |   dd-wrt   |     |   Desktop Switch   |
                   +-----------+   +------------+     +--------------------+
                         |               |              |       |          \
                         |               |              |       |           \
                   +-----------+   +------------+       |       |           _\
                   | Microsoft |   |  Sony PS3  |       |       |          \
                   |   XBMC    |   +------------+       |       |           \
                   +-----------+                        |       |     +--------------+
                                   +---------------+    |       |     | Nintendo Wii |
                                   | Dell Latitude |----+       |     +--------------+
                                   |  D820 Laptop  |            |
                                   +---------------+     +----------------+
                                                         | D-Link DNS-323 |
                                                         | NAS w/ 1TB HDD |
                                                         +----------------+

Continue reading wireless network woes →

i was having some trouble copying a file over from the NAS. i telnet’d into the NAS and tried to copy the file over and i got an input/output error. clearly something was wrong with the disk…and then i remembered that there was a power failure last night and it could very well be that the disk got corrupted when that happened. the big question that was presented to me was how do you check the disk for errors when this happens?

surely d-link has created some tool in the webUI somewhere to fix disk errors, right? nope.

so what am i supposed to do? in linux, i’d reboot and fsck the partition…but how do i do that with the NAS? it turns out that there’s a port of fsck for DNS-323 which will reboot and let you mount the main paritions for fsck’ing. fantastic!

i’m fsck’ing the RAID volume now so hopefully that will fix up all of my problems.

always, always problems with the d-link dns-323, mediatomb, and the ps3. it appears that for some of the xvid AVIs that i get, the ps3 just refuses to play them. i suspect the culprit here is that whatever encoding is being used is something that the ps3 just doesn’t quite understand. the files play fine on any computer.

this problem isn’t that big of a problem, but it does creep up from time to time. it seems to be particularly problematic on older encoded files. i suspect that old versions xvid or divx aren’t backwards compatible enough, but whatever the problem is, the solution is not particularly elegant.

i tried to get ffmpeg running on the dns-323, but whenever i try to re-encode with ffmeg on the dns-323, i get errors on the encoding. if i was using a more powerful streaming server, i could re-encode on the fly, but since that isn’t an option, the only other thing to do is re-encode these files elsewhere. i know, it sucks, it’s awful, but i just can’t think of anything else.

there are plenty of free encoders out there, one that i particularly like is handbrake. it’s not very easy to batch many files, but if you have one or two, it’s great. there’s a command line version of it too, so you can use that to script it if you want. i’m thinking about making some kind of web service that will let me copy a file over somehwere, encode the video, and copy it back…

but for now, i’m just remote desktop’ing into another machine and doing it by hand. so long as you can batch the job, it doesn’t seem to be too big of a problem.

my domain registrar used to be directnic.com. they were great at the time because their pricing was pretty competitive, but over the years, big registrars like godaddy.com have come and their pricing is hard to beat. i have finally used up the last of my credit at directnic, so i’m moving my domains over to godaddy. so far the process has been pretty painless, but i’m just waiting for directnic to relinquish control of the domains and move it over. i haven’t had to talk to anyone yet, the process seems pretty well managed online.

let’s see how long it takes to transfer over.

the media center in the rarely-used upstairs tv has died. this comes with great regret as i had high hopes for it and rarely ever used it. but not all bad things come with no good news, this gives me an opportunity to get a new media center solution. i started to think about what i was going to get, but i realized that i have an idle xbox media center lying around. all i needed was to get a wireless ethernet adapter, but when i started to look online, they were going for $50-80! ridiculous!

it’s actually cheaper to buy a cheap dd-wrt compatible router, flash the firmware, and make it work as an ethernet bridge than to buy an ethernet bridge. so i was going to go do that, but it turns out that paul had a spare router he wasn’t using, so i picked it up and now i have the xbox setup and working fine. my wireless network at home has become increasingly more and more complex. i was worried that it wouldn’t be able to handle the bits that i’m throwing around, but it seems fine, albeit, slow. =P

probably one of the most useful firefox add-on tools i use is add n edit cookies. it has been invaluable and has made my life so much easier. but today for a few hours i could not figure out why some of my code was failing.

it turns out that when viewing cookies through the add n edit cookies add-on, the add-on urlencodes the cookie before displaying it. this wasn’t terribly obvious to me today because i was trying to manipulate a gzipped, base 64-encoded cookie. it looked like gibberish to me to begin with, so i didn’t realize what was going on for a long while.

why? why add n edit cookies would you do that to me?

and more importantly, why am i still working at 4:45PM on the day before thanksgiving!?

dardy affectionately calls us the “bowling gang” and last night we did just that: bowled. it’s been forever since we last went bowling and it was good to be out there again and have some fun. though it was a long time since we last went bowling, it was pretty easy for me to get back into the groove. we all went out bowling to celebrate dardy’s real birthday, though we already had celebrated his birthday over the weekend.

at the end of the evening, i think we had 8 people on one lane. playing two games took nearly three hours and i didn’t get home until well past midnight…on a school night! i’m tired now and i think that i may have tweaked my back just a little bit, but it was worth it because i bowled a 181 and a 195. that’s probably the highest average i’ve bowled ever. usually if i have a good game then i’ll have a bad game so i usually average around 130ish.

anyhow, it was fun to bowl and maybe i’ll make more of an effort to go bowling more often. at $2 a game, it’s still cheap entertainment.

seems like every time i fill up the tank, gas prices are still dropping. i don’t even remember when gas prices were this low, but it is fantastic. i just filled up a tank of gas at $1.84 a gallon. now that gas is so cheap, it may be time to start planning a road trip of sorts…