Free Router Firmware Upgrades

I’ve been using an old Linksys WRT-54G (version 2.0) for years, while Linksys released a few firmware updates over the years, none of them really added any new functionality. Thankfully, they had released the source code to the open-source community and several excellent releases have been made available.

Additions such as real-time monitoring/graphing, boosting wireless transmitter power, QoS (Quality of Service) and WOL (Wake-on-LAN) have been added making the router and network much more useful and valuable.

The most prominent versions are:

NOTE: There are several branches on both of these, you can read more at their respective websites.

I was easily able to update from the Linksys firmware (4.21.1) to Tomato 1.25 in only a few minutes, it was even capable of saving my existing configuration making the transition that much easier!

Happy Networking

Open Source Desktop Virtualization

Through the years, I’ve had to develop, maintain and support software on a variety of systems. Unfortunately, it’s often impossible to maintain specific software versions or configurations installed on physical machines. In the realm of web development, this becomes increasingly complex because of the rapid release of multiple browser versions.

To aid in testing, I’ve found that it’s often best to run these configurations in Virtual Machines, I’ve used VirtualPC and VMWare in the past, but have recently become a fan of Sun‘s OpenSource release of VirtualBox as it runs on a wide variety of host systems and supports most x86 based operating systems as clients.

Cheers

Atari 2600 Emulator

While it was not technically a personal computer, the Atari 2600 was one of the first pieces of technology that I had experience with in my youth. I’ll likely outline the progression of machines/operating systems in a future post.

I’ve heard about Stella for quite a while, but never had any time to fiddle with it. Recently I found that Ubuntu includes an installer for it and took a chance look. Other versions are available for MacOS and Windows.

I also found a few websites that contain ROM images for the emulator and was playing some of my old games in a matter of minutes.

For those legal types out there… I actually do own the games that I played, in fact, they are currently boxed up in my basement.

References:

Happy Retro Gaming!!!

Converting IBM Jetspeed to JSR-168 Portlets

This topic has come up a few times, especially for some peers that originally built to IBM’s proprietary portlet specification, but desire to move to the “standard” portlet specification.

I found a decent write-up on this topic at IBM:
http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/websphere/library/techarticles/0412_paeffgen/0412_paeffgen.html

Cheers!

Free Computer Based VOIP

I’ve used a variety of computer based VOIP over the years. My current preference in this space is Skype as it’s free for computer-to-computer calls and even allows calls to and from regular phones (at a fee).

Video and text chat are also provided, as is ‘white-boarding’ with additional plugins.

Skype is available for most platforms, even mobile phones… I’ve found that while the Windows beta versions has some additional features, the Linux release is rock-solid.

http://www.skype.com/

There are also several hardware based solutions, like Vonage, available to replace your traditional phone service… perhaps we’ll cover that later.

Skype me!

Shellback initiation

I first crossed on way from the Persian Gulf to Darwin, Australia on USS Helena (SSN-725) on 22 February 1994 (15 years ago, wow!), Longitude CLASSIFIED!

As is Navy tradition, there were some initiation rituals and a ‘Steel Beach Picnic’ and swim call on the equator.

Now get below decks and swap – Pollywog!

Digital Television Transition – starts today

Today is February 17th 2009… up until a few week ago when President Barack Obama signed into law the “DTV Delay Act” officially making the new date June 12th because the government ran out of money for coupons to offset the cost of converter boxes.

Regardless, in many communities some television stations will end their analog transmissions and begin digital-only.

I’m all for digital content as the quality is obviously better, but from my background in communications it’ll likely be impaired more by foul weather and not have the range of the analog stations in the past… oh, well!

REFERENCES:

Cheers!

Open Source FTP Client (and Server)

At one time, FTP was the only means available to move large files, times have changed but the need still exists, especially for developers like myself.

For years I’ve happily used FileZilla for my FTP needs, the client is available on most platforms. There is also a server available for Windows as most Linux variants already provide FTP.

Happy file transfers!

Yahoo! Exceptional Performance (for Web Applications)

I spend a LOT of time trying to optimize web applications to run and appear as fast as possible, one of the most valuable tools I have in my “bag of tricks” is the YSlow! plugin for Firefox.

It integrates in the browser and gives a near real-time scoring of the pages you visit and suggestions on how to improve them. While some of the suggestions are not practical (for example: use of a CDN) the bulk of them can be applied to your application code or server with a little bit of work.

The rules and scoring mechanisms are well documented at the following website:

The YSlow! plugin is available here:
http://developer.yahoo.com/yslow/

Happy… Faster Surfing!

MySQL (Windows) service startup error 1067

I’ve installed and managed dozens of MySQL installations for several years, occasionally it seems that an install just doesn’t run like it has in the past.

Recently I had a problem where the service would not start (Error 1067) on Windows Server 2003 (R2)… which is running under VMWare. After checking the obvious places and turning up nothing I started down the list of potential solutions exposed by Google search.

The ultimate solution it seems is that the ‘my.ini’ file needed to include the specific path information required by the service…. without it the service would not start.

Here’s my current file (c:\windows\my.ini) for reference:

[WinMySQLAdmin]
Server=C:/mysql40/bin/mysqld-nt.exe
[mysqld]
basedir=c:/mysql40
datadir=c:/mysql40/data

For the really observant readers of this entry… you will notice that this is for MySQL 4.0 (which is no longer officially supported). It’s mostly used as it is widely compatible across various host systems that are sometimes problematic with newer releases.

Cheers.