i summon one kim

I added a Turtle Beach AudioTron to my stereo system this week. It’s an MP3 / WMA player that fits comfortably in a rack together with all the other hi-fi gear. I have already been storing the best parts of my CD collection on the home network as MP3 files, so I can listen to my favourites on the train (just copy files to a portable MP3 player) and while working on the computer. With the AudioTron all those files can be played on the stereo system. (more…)

I have been using my computer to record TV shows, and watch them later (well, you all know what a VCR can do). But under Windows XP the Media Player cannot keep up with the MPEG decoding. The CPU is pegged at 100% and video/audio sync suffers.

I am running this on a 1.7 GHz Pentium 4 which has 512 MB of RAM, so it cannot be a hardware performance issue. With Windows 2000 there were no problems. Windows 2000 is decoding fine even on a 800 MHz Pentium III laptop and 1280×1024 full-screen display mode. (more…)

I’ve been converted to a Windows XP Professional user! I’ve run XP on my desktop for a couple of months now, and I finally rebuilt my laptop (for the 5th time) in the hopes of making it work better. The install procedure needs some cleanup, but for the most part that will have to wait until something breaks enough to require re-installing.

My laptop troubles began when I tried to install XP on it — the wireless LAN would no longer work for more than 30 seconds. Unfortunately reinstalling Windows 2000 Professional did not result in the same reliable system that I had before.

Since I’m already planning on 802.11a I won’t spend time in fixing the old infrastructure (especially with one of the Airports dying on me), but instead get the new gear running with XP. More about that later…

Running XP on the desktop has been a good experience. It runs faster and smoother than Windows 2000. Some of the major winning points:

• much better CIFS (or SMB) performance
• system snapshots for recovering from bad software installs
• device driver rollback capability
• support for more (modern) hardware

Seems like this was — for once — a worth-while upgrade.

Well, at least half a Saturday (just in case Otto is reading this — I’m working on the new NetBSD kernel, really). With the day’s chores completed I can look forward to a (hopefully) double-feature movie night, in a big screen home theater!

Since the last few Saturdays have been more or less work-filled (well, last Saturday most of my time was spent waiting, but nevertheless) it is nice to have a day with my very own agenda. Sleep late, have some breakfast and good coffee, check mail (the on-line kind), have a chat with my friends…

On the NetBSD front I would need to accomplish a couple of things: enable MPPE for PPTP connections, and try to debug IPsec panics. The latter are caused by more recent kernels, which are required by the former. Fun!

Movie choices for tonight include Moulin Rouge! that I’m told must be viewed on a huge screen, The Terminator with a brand new 5.1 stereo remix, and The Score which comes with very mixed reviews. But that’ll be another entry.

I just became a WikkiTikkiTavi developer today! I’ve been eyeing Tavi for a while now, and got it installed at work. I wanted to be able to play with it without keeping people from being productive so I decided to power www.suominen.org by it.

My PHP installation was too secure for running Tavi, although I didn’t know that right away. I was just getting blank pages (just like with phpWebSite), but I was determined to find out why. After some code reading and referencing of www.php.net I figured the problem was the register_globals=off setting in my php.ini file.

Obviously the right fix was not changing php.ini so I contributed my first generally useful patch to Tavi. I’m hoping there will more in the future — plans will be forming on my personal page on Tavi.

I’ve been running UseModWiki on www.tcsh.org and some other sites since April, 2001. I just collected the most useful tweaks and patches I’ve made to it. Links to all that are now available on my personal page on UseModWiki.

So much for Manhattan, then… A week ago I moved all the computers to my apartment, with the help of Christos, Karen and Larry.

I’ve spent hours tweaking configurations to make sure all the home pages, mail and domains are functioning like before. There is still work to be done, and I also want to replace one of the computers with a quieter one (yes, I get to listen to these all day and night).

The old DNS server with some supporting infrastructure is still running on Manhattan, until I have a new one in Stamford to take over its role. The Astron FTP server is also still on Manhattan. The GW FTP server is still unavailable.

Servers that are accessed from the Internet will all be dual-homed due to technical restrictions on the DSL line (it is a bridged connection). Each machine will need a second network card with an external IP address and a firewall access list. To make the experience smooth for users I also have to setup dual DNS. This should all be completed by the end of the month.

Tonight turned out to be a double feature, a rare occasion since years ago. I chose another feel good movie: Disney’s The Kid.

I guess a Disney film would be a safe bet in the feel good category. Bruce Willis and Spencer Breslin provide a good contrast as the 39-year old Russel Duritz of today and the 8-year old Rusty, the kid of Russel’s forgotten childhood. Russel has worked hard to change himself into what he is today, but it turns out Rusty’s dreams don’t match the man he has become.

You may feel like you can guess the whole story, but even if you did, I think the plot stays interesting throughout the movie and you’ll never guess all of it.

And then there is Lily Tomlin, who always delivers a delightfully funny experience, no matter how small or big a role.

Here is a movie for everyone to see. Life is serious, life is rewarding, life is surprising. If this does not get you hooked on Scandinavian films, nothing will.

As you can read from any review, Babette’s Feast is about a French cook, Babette, who flees Paris and moves into a small and remote seaside town in Denmark. After winning in a lottery she asks to prepare a French feast dinner for the villagers. She is granted her wish, but then the villagers start to worry about opening the door to sinly pleasures, not knowing what to expect. It is a pleasure to see the effects of the feast on everyone.

I really enjoyed the movie. The story is heart-warming, the actors true to life, and the scenery is beautiful if austere. Definitely worth renting, or better yet — add it to your collection.

GW’s Manhattan network has been back since October 6th. It took a while to bring everything back to normal, but now it is done!

We had no Internet connectivity for almost 3 weeks, and there was really nothing we could do about it. These pictures from the CO that our lines run to won’t leave you wondering why. I’m glad it didn’t take any longer to restore connectivity. We had a wireless link up a bit earlier, but it was only for private connectivity and could not be used effectively for our services.

Several temporary services have been running at my home to provide e-mail and net access to our users. Next week these are being closed down — my residential RADSL line is no T-1. I almost lost that line, too, but Speakeasy relocated their NYC POP customers to other POPs. For a while I had to run everything on the Optimum Online cable TV hookup, which is practically never down. It is just a pity they don’t provide static IP addresses or allow running servers.

Now it is time to plan for better replication of important data, an off-line archive of backups, and a new network hookup that does not run through NYC.