Alston Grove

Every so often, a piece of hardware with modest popularity and unrealized potential is catapulted into infamy when it is hacked. People hack it and make it do things beyond its original design. That is definitely the case with the series of wireless routers from Linksys. I originally bought my Linksys WRT54G to free my laptop from its twisted-pair tether and to act as a firewall for my network. It quickly reached limitations, however, and I dedicated a PC to running Endian firewall (based on IPCop) instead.

Years passed, and now I am tired of listening to the whine of PC fans that saturate my living space. I have built out a home network with multiple machines as a kind of lab playground. It’s been fun and educational, but now I’d like less noise and clutter. The FitPC is an interesting little system running on AMD Geode and Linux, with a small profile and no fans. The mini-ITX systems at Mini Box are also interesting. Everyone seems to be getting in on the action, with the “mini computer” category on NewEgg.

And then a friend pointed out that I have the perfect hardware under my nose. It just needs an upgrade of its software. So I took the plunge and installed the open source DD-WRT on my old Linksys router. Setup is easy. The user interface is more sophisticated and informative. And there are enough knobs and dials to keep any hacker happy. It simply blows away the old software.

Now that I have saved a little power and made things a little quieter, I wonder what can I do about this noisy computer sitting on my desk? We’ll have to see about that.

Some of my media has worn out and some is on the verge of obsolescence. Media deteriorates from common environmental factors like heat, moisture, and light. For CD and DVD discs, oxidation is often the reason for failure. Magnetic media seems even more susceptible: small electric fields, dust, and mold can also weaken it. For tapes, simple things like using “pause” too much or leaving the tape partially wound can weaken the signal. If the media doesn’t fail, it may still become unusable as the format loses support. I have a bunch of Video 8 tapes and no way to play them. I may have to send them to a service like Home Movie Depot to get them digitized and recorded on modern media.

My plan is to go gold — to store everything on archival gold DVD and CD media. They actually use gold in the reflective layer, which is naturally inert and resistant to the environment. The dye used to write the data is also specially formulated to be very stable and accurate. Some archival media come with a scratch-resistant coating on the surface as well. Using N.I.S.T.’s (National Institute of Standards and Technology) accelerated aging process to test these media, they are expected to last 100 years for DVDs and 300 years for CDs. Based on those tests, my idea is to convert movies to DVD and store photos and other files on CD. I bought a spindle of Vertbatim Ultralife Gold Archival discs and a solvent-free pen for labeling them. Now, if I can just keep the kids from treating them like frisbees, I’ll be golden.

The basement looks like a graveyard for computer hardware, all victims of the PC plague. Sinclair. Coleco. Commodore. Amiga. They all still work, but their owner, sadly, pays them little attention, except for an occasional nostalgic power up. It’s time they found better homes. But first, history must be preserved.

I bought a XE/XM-1541 adapter on E-Bay that was originally made by VintageComputerCables.com. One end plugs into a Commodore 1541 floppy drive, the other end into the PC parallel port. Using Star Commander in DOS or OpenCBM on Linux, it’s possible to transfer a disk image (a D64 file). It also works with a 1581 drive and 3.5 floppies (a D81 file). I made disk images of all my programs. Remarkably, everything was still readable. I tried to copy some old commercial games, but the copy protection on the disks prevented it. It made sense after I thought about it. Anyway, my personal stuff was more important.

They run great under VICE, which is a very complete Commodore emulator. It even emulates the slow load times, or you can turn on warp mode when you’re feeling impatient. A friend pointed me to FC64, a Commodore 64 emulator written in Flash that can already play some programs. That’s crazy.

Even after making disk images to complete my C-64 codeography, I still can’t bring myself to pitch the stacks of old floppies. I feel like one of those people on Style Network’s Clean House who live in clutter because they can’t part with anything that carries a memory. I’ll work myself up to it eventually.

It took me a little longer than I wanted, but the results are worth it. My MAME cabinet is fully operational:

I’m slowly documenting the steps and materials to build it on my MAME cabinet page. The controls are all working, although I still need a light to make the trackball glow. The coin doors light up and accept quarters for games. (Coin entry is also simulated by holding down Player-1 and tapping Button A.) It makes me feel like a kid again.

SymmetricDS is web-enabled, database independent, data synchronization software. It supports near real time data synchronization between remote databases that do not have to be of the same type. The software was designed to scale for a large number of databases, work across low-bandwidth connections, and withstand periods of network outage.

If you’ve been wondering what I’ve been up to lately, I’m proud to have spent my time co-authoring SymmetricDS with Chris Henson and others.
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My iRiver iHP became a brick when its hard drive died. It was time for an upgrade anyway. One thing I realized after all that use was that I really didn’t need to carry 20 gigs of music around. My new player had to be small, sleek and support Rockbox, the open-source firmware for mp3 players. I chose the newly supported Sandisk Sansa e270.

The factory firmware on the Sansa is pretty and worked quite well at first, but I soon experienced problems. First of all, and strangely enough, the minimum volume was uncomfortably loud. There was actually a setting to fix this. Next, advancing to the next song required hitting the button twice, sometimes. If the LCD is on, hit the button once to advance, if the LCD screen is sleeping, hit the button once to wake it, then again to advance. How annoying! The final straw came after I added more songs to the player, but was unable to find them and play them.

Installing Rockbox was much easier than I had imagined. All I had to do was download and unzip a file onto the player, then run a small installer that writes a boot loader to the player. The original Sansa firmware is still there and can be booted. But now Rockbox boots by default.

The default Rockbox is plain-looking, but it is feature-rich. I quickly found font and theme files that can be unzipped to add Rockbox eye-candy. I can’t believe how fast it boots, and I am convinced the player actually sounds better now. How long before factory players start shipping with this on it?

There is a section of the population that responds to surveys. I am not in that section. A piece of mail from J. D. Power and associates arrived by post, and I opened it for some reason. “Another survey,” I muttered to myself after I saw the questionnarie. But before I tossed it away, I noticed they had enclosed a crisp one-dollar bill. I instantly had two thoughts. First, why bother insulting someone with such a paltry incentive? Second, I wondered if the postman would figure it out and collect all the letters. (I quickly realized that the surveys are randomly dispersed, so a single local postman wouldn’t have much of a shot at collecting the money.) But the first thought still puzzled me.

Back to that section of the population that responds to surveys. It turns out that it’s typically 2 percent. That statistic alone isn’t the worst problem for a marketer. The bigger problem is that the people who do fill out the survey are the kind of people who fill out surveys. In other words, it’s not a good sampling. So, marketers experimented with different incentives, like sending a cash incentive in the initial mailing, or entering respondents in a prize drawing. Of course, this affects the cost of running the survey. Experiments with cash incentives (for example, $1 and $2 vs $5 and $5 vs $10 vs $20) have been done and compared to a lottery of $250. The incentives drew more reponses, and the higher cash incentives drew more responses. But the biggest pop was from, you guessed it: a one-dollar bill.

If you use the “snooze” button too much like I do, maybe you should consider Clocky. It’s an alarm clock on wheels that hops off the night stand and rolls around aimlessly, forcing you to get up and chase it. People have posted video of Clocky to YouTube, and there’s even a Clocky Commercial. It’s like having R2D2 wake you up!

I’m working my way home through rush hour traffic when I’m suddenly jolted by a piercing BEEEEEP and an alarming, flashing message on my dash. I nearly wrecked in astonishment. Here was my car communicating with me, because it knows better than I do, and it was commanding an immediate action from me without further discussion: STOP!

Ah, those clever German engineers have whipped up a grand user experience. There’s no better way to keep me safe than inducing panic as I hurtle across asphalt in a metal object surrounded by other metal objects.

They could have just informed me, and let me make the decision on how to handle it. How about telling me, “Antilock brake fault, using manual brakes.” Then I might think, “I better get the ABS fixed, but until then, I’ll give myself some more stopping distance.”

So I pull my car into a local shop, and they hook it up to a fancy computer that just got several hundred dollars of new software installed. But the car won’t talk. It will only talk to an authorized VW technician. I have to schedule an appointment. So I have a car with bad brakes telling me to stop and it will only tell a dealer what is wrong. I need an open source car.

Sun announced that Java will be released under the GNU Public License V2! You should have no trouble reading about it, such as in Eweek’s article Sun Pours Out Java Cup. Or read a Q&A with James Gosling on open sourcing Java.

This means that the J2SE, J2ME, and J2EE source code will be released under GPL2 sometime in March 2007. It includes a special clarification, ala GNU Classpath, so you can write closed source applications that run in the VM. One immediate effect of all this is that Java can now be included in Linux distributions. In the longer term, this is going to have repercussions for .NET.

For a while, I had some interest in .NET, being no less than a ECMA/ISO standard, and even bolstered by open source hacker Miguel de Icaza (whose passion is infectious). But with recent events, the outlook for .NET has changed. Now that Novell has partnered with Microsoft and both have agreed not to sue for patent infringements, it is obvious that Mono cannot be considered safe from patent encumberment and royalties. And Sun has chosen GPL for Java’s new license, effectively granting free use of any patents to every programmer who uses it. The choice for me is very easy and obvious now. Kudos to Sun!