Just a plug for the Tomato replacement firmware for Linksys WRT-based routers. What a beautiful bunch of work. I haven’t really looked at options since the openwrt WhiteRussian 0.9 days, and Tomato blew me away. I’ve just heard about x-wrt too, but I really can’t find anything lacking in Tomato.
Archive for June, 2008
WRT54GS and Tomato
Friday, June 27th, 2008My Dreams… They are crushed.
Thursday, June 26th, 2008I had an awesome plan to become a billionaire this morning. Unfortunately, Forex.com won’t sell Zimbabwean dollars to me.
Sigh.
Buggy Bug Bug
Wednesday, June 25th, 2008I was outside killing a hornets nest when I looked down and saw a lovely specimen of calosoma scrutator. I’d never seen one before, and was somewhat baffled by it. My initial guess was that it was some kind of beetle larva, given that it had six legs but no wings. I wasn’t sure, though.
I brought it inside for L to see… She was impressed, but more interested in making a house for it than identifying it. I took it upstairs and tried to take a few macro shots of it, but the bugger moved around so much that getting any good detail was difficult. I gave up after a while and let the beastie have its freedom (away from the now-dead hornets nest).
After L’s bedtime, I did some wandering through the entomology section of Wikipedia, and while fascinating (did you know that Wood Lice (aka pill bugs, roly-polys, doodlebugs, etc.) are land-adapted crustaceans?), I wasn’t able to identify my critter. I was able to narrow down my search to beetles, however. Under Hexapoda, there are only two major classes, and I knew my bug wasn’t in Entognatha (weirdos). Drilling down into Insecta, I looked at Archeognatha, because they’re wingless. My bug didn’t have the distinct three-pronged tails that those guys do (think jumping silverfish). Definitely not Thysanura (non-jumping silverfish).
I started looking at the sub-clades of Neoptera, because the other stuff seemed too weird. The only thing that seemed to fit was Coleoptera (beetles), but this didn’t feel right because my bug didn’t have wings. Then I read about how some female beetles retain their larval form into adulthood, and this made me remember what female lighting bugs look like, and my earlier guess. OK, so I knew it was a beetle larva, but didn’t know what kind of beetle.
After a lot of digging, I came across an entry on whatsthatbug.com, and there it was. That’s an awesome site. Excitement abounds. Anyhow, here’s a picture of one of the gruesome monster’s kin. Apparently these things are very good for taking out infestations of things like gypsy moth caterpillars. I’m glad I let it go.
Damn Skippy.
Thursday, June 19th, 2008Everyone else is making big announcements and putting out new stuff… So we figured we’d get on the bandwagon.
We’d wanted to distribute an actual ISO, rather than this hokey “build your own ISO” script, but our lawyers are protecting us from ourselves, or something. Makia did several presentations about our product at ISC, and so far the feedback we’ve gotten has been good. I guess we did something right!
Some of us saw the wrong side of dawn a few times, but it’s done. We’ll take a few minutes to breathe, and then push on to make the product that we really wanted to put out there.
mountains
Monday, June 16th, 2008I was traveling for business, but staying in someone’s house while they weren’t there. The house was in europe, somewhere. Switzerland? Huge mountains rising up abruptly out of a plain. The plain was covered with absolutely HUGE radio towers. The bases were 10 miles on a side.
Anyhow, the car had GPS, but that’s not all… It drove itself. I got the impression that it used a combination of GPS and LIDAR to figure out appropriate speeds for upcoming turns. Not unlike CMU’s robot, I suppose. This was particularly cool because I could sleep, although I was nervous about letting it drive by itself on the wind-ey mountain roads.
I think it was an Audi. Was red, anyhow. Oh, and it had a huge amount of power. The road from the plain up into the mountains was pretty much a single slope instead of switchbacks. And the car was able to race up several thousand feet in just a minute or so.
