ben robison

Microsoft vs. Apple

Just had an interesting experience that I found mildly humourous. Maybe I’m a little cynical about Microsoft at the moment (I just read a negative review for Office for Mac 08 at AppleInsider) but I thought I’d share a story about attention to detail.

I just noticed that the clock on my XP machine was an hour behind. Having just passed daylight savings time a week ago, I make the assumption that it hasn’t yet reset itself. So I open the properties box and make sure it’s set to automatically retrieve time from time.windows.com. It was. I forced the time sync, waited for about 45 seconds and was told that it couldn’t sync to that time server.

I opened System Preferences on my Macbook, to see what time server it synced to. I switched my XP box to sync to time.apple.com, it immediately refreshed and now my clock tells correct time. I’ll let you draw your own conclusions =)

Macbook Pro Uptime

Rebooting is standard procedure for nearly every computer I own or have ever owned.  I’ve noticed however that whenever I have to reboot my Mac, it makes me mildly angry.  I’ve become accustomed to running my six standard applications (Firefox, Mail, Adium, iCal, iTunes, and NetNewsWire Lite) all the time.  I literally never turn them off.  When my computer goes in my backpack, it’s sleeping and ready to go at a moment’s notice.

Uptime is something that people usually are proud of when they talk about servers, but in my own little world, I started taking pride in my laptop uptime.  The latest security update from Apple forced me to restart my computer, but prior to that, I had achieved a short month of uptime.

My father-in-law just announced his anger at Microsoft again, but this time it was enough that he wanted to go Mac.  Freezing and restarting is one of his major gripes.  When I shared this little screenshot with him he was stunned speechless.

Favorite Firefox Extensions

I’m always on the prowl for new Firefox extensions to make browsing easier for me, and thought I’d share some of my findings. I use Firefox primarily on my Mac, but on my work computer and home computer I’ve installed the very same plugins. It’s nice to have the same setup anywhere you go.

I’d be curious to know what Firefox extensions you all use and find invaluable on a daily basis. Please leave comments below. I use the default theme, it’s simple and clean, and I use the following extensions:

1. Noscript: This one takes a bit of getting used to, but it offers me incredible peace of mind when it comes to online security. Noscript blacklists all javascript from running unless you allow it. You can always allow specific sites, or enable the site only for a specific browsing session. I find that I’m a creature of habit, so I tend to visit the same sites most of the time. After about a week of tuning, I now browse anywhere I want without fear that Javascript is secretly stealing my identity.This required some adjustments in my browsing habits, and very occasionally, I stumble upon a site that just doesn’t seem to work properly. When that happens, I must either decide that I didn’t really want to see that page anyway, or fire up another browser.
2. Adblock Plus + Adblock Filterset G. Updater: Makes for a cleaner browsing experience without so many flashing banners. Adblock blocks adds based on specifc patterns while the Filterset updates every week or so and adds new patterns to block.
3. Fission: Shows a pages load progress in the address bar, Safari style. No practical application, but it’s lightweight and it looks nice.
4. Firebug: I recently switched to Firebug after using the Web Development Toolbar for a long time. While Firebug won’t change your screensize for you, I find it much more helpful for showing page hierarchies, javascript errors, css, etc. It will even show you the HTTP headers going back and forth (which is helpful for showing AJAX calls happening while you’re on a page. The interface is simple and clean. I love it.
5. del.icio.us: It took me a long time, but I jumped on the del.icio.us bandwagon not to long ago. This extension is invaluable for tagging, and quickly viewing my del.icio.us bookmarks.
6. GMail Manager: Recently upgraded from GMail Notifier to GMail Manager. I’m still in the trial period, but so far I like it. If you’ve got more than one GMail account that you need to check regularly, this is probably indispensable.
7. SwitchProxy Tool: For those times when my RSS feeds lead me to YouTube videos that I want to see, but can’t from my current location. Fire up my SSH connection my server at home, then reload the page with SwitchProxy. YouTube plays just fine from wherever I am.

Save The Internet - Preserve Net Neutrality

I’ve added a new link in the Links section and thought it was important enough to explain why.

Up until now, the internet has been a neutral playground.  Anyone could post content of any type, but your internet service provider probably does not want this to continue.  Most ISPs are now trying to prioritize content into different categories and make you pay  more if you want to access certain kinds.

Are you a YouTube fan?  Well, they could throttle back the bandwidth on streaming video unless you’re willing to pay extra.  Same goes for music, or anything else you might be looking at.

This is a bad thing for all those web loving people in the world.  The web is the great leveler of today’s society.  Everyone competes in a common arena, with no one being more special than another.  The smallest blogger in the smallest corner of the web is free to publish ideas and make his voice heard.

I’m not the expert, but I know where I stand.  Google has explained it better than I can.  Google supports net neutrality.  RockTheNet is a coalition of bands and musical artists that support net neutrality.  As always you can find out more on Wikipedia.

There is a vote coming this May in congress that will decide the future of the web as we know it.  Will it remain neutral?  Visit http://SaveTheInternet.com or Google’s Net Neutrality page to find out what you can do to make your voice heard and help save the internet.

dd-wrt Open Source Firmware

My trusty Linksys router has been going steady for close to 4 years now, but recently it’s started having some troubles.  It was still performing most of its duties just fine, but the wireless started to become very problematic.  In addition, it uses Stateful Packet Inspection as part of the firewall, which completely breaks down with the new Windows Vista TCP/IP stack (I found that out during beta, I don’t actually run Vista at home).

So I figured that since my laptop was the only wireless device on my home network, I could just work around it, and plug in whenever I needed internet access.  Certainly limiting, but on a student budget, I didn’t feel like fronting the money for a new router.

The recent win at the Web Analytics Competition provided some play money, and somehow a Nintendo Wii found its way into my entertainment center.  Now those of you familiar with the Wii know that it has built in wifi (yes it’s only 802.11B, but wireless is wireless).  Suddenly I had another wireless device to manage.  The Wii connected fine originally and downloaded the system updates, but whenever I tried to connect to WiiConnect24 (which enables every other internet enabled feature on the Wii) it errored out with a 220602 error whenever I tried to access the EULA.

After googling around a bit, I found a solution that involved turning off all your encryption, etc., accepting the EULA, turning all your encryption back on, and continuing as normal.  I tried this solution and found it to be lacking.  I still received the same error.

I had heard of dd-wrt (pronounced “d-d-wort”) before, but was a little nervous about using it.  The complete and utter lack of wireless functionality finally got to me, and tonight I broke down and installed dd-wrt.

dd-wrt is an open source firmware for use on many varieties of routers, but has found a home among those fed up with their Linksys WRT54G series routers.  It wasn’t all rose, but after a few hours of playing around, I’m up and running successfully on encrypted wireless on the dd-wrt mini firmware for WRT54G.

Unfortunately, I’m not sure what happened.  I’m sure you’ve all had those moments that after screwing around with everything you can think of, giving up a few times, trying again, something finally gives and it works, but you don’t know what happened?  This was one of those times.

I originally flashed my router with the dd-wrt standard image and thought I had bricked my router (bricked = turned into an expensive plastic brick that doesn’t do anything but flash lights).  Linksys provides a management console to recover from such things, but I was having trouble getting there.  Try as I might, that console to load the original firmware back just wouldn’t come up.  I got online and ordered my Airport Extreme Base Station figuring if I was gonna spend money, I might as well spend a lot and get the best.

But I have trouble giving up on things, so I tried the hard reset to get to the Linksys Managament console again and the dd-wrt suddenly came up and was seemingly working.  However as I began to change settings, it appeared that the update.cgi script that should have been running to save my settings wasn’t actually running at all.

After another hard reset, I flashed it back to the Linksys firmware which came up and allowed me to configure away.  However, this less than optimal solution turned out that I still didn’t have wireless.  I tried again with the dd-wrt mini firmware and all seems to be well.  The mini firmware seems to have all the functionality that the original Linksys firmware had.  One thing in particular that I missed from my brief view of the standard image was the ability to do your dynamic DNS right from the router.  Anyway, everything is working, the Wii got its EULA and my MacBook Pro is now up and running wirelessly.

I just cancelled my order for the Airport Extreme Base Station from Apple.  I figure now that all these issues are resolved, I might give my free copy of Vista another go and see how it runs.  I’m reluctant to do this however, since I swiped the Ram from my desktop and put it in my server, and a server just doesn’t seem like the best place for a consumer release of Vista.

So to wrap things up, if you’re fed up with your WRT54G router (or many others, see this page for a list of supported routers) and you’re looking for something new, you might want to give dd-wrt a try.  It’s working great for me.