The Treehouse Blog

Today the Axim refused to connect via Wifi. Thinking about it, I realized that this hadn’t been tried since I had attempted to connect with a Bluetooth WAP a few days earlier. Trying everything in the configuration, and reading over sites didn’t help at all. So, I looked into firmware updates and found that I could upgrade from A02 to A05. I did so, and wireless worked in the “clean” install, but didn’t again when I restored my backup. Then I dug through the Windows folder and ran the WirelessPower executable, which fixed things right up. I should have tried that earlier… the Dell WLAN Utility was showing that the wireless card was not present, but I would have never thought this executable would have been the only way to power it up. Oh well. I have new firmware now :).

Now that’s what you call a non-trivial pile of Cisco! The 3550s (qty: 45) are all for ResNET. The 2950s (qty: 70) are all for campus. The whole order is meant to facilitate deployment of “Campus Manager” (someone’s proprietary software on their black-box linux machine) throughout campus. Somehow this is all supposed to get done before the start of the semester, despite the fact that Campus Manager hasn’t arrived yet.

Ship isn’t the only thing doing replacements. I purchased a 3361 off of eBay to replace my 3360 that has the squeeze-hard-to-make-display-visible and the characters-are-inverted-or-something issues. Moving my account to the new phone was relatively painless… call in, they tell you to turn old phone off, power on new phone (that’s already AT&T-ified) and dial a special (probably one-time) number. Just about instant.

Lastly, Doug forwarded me an e-mail from Dennis saying that the Kodak DX-7630 6.1 MPixel camera was on insane sale at Office Max. Although $250 for a $400 camera is a great deal, the Office Max experience was a bit of a pain. First, it was in-store only. Carlisle didn’t have any in stock. Their default warehouse (queried thru a Unisys amber-CRT terminal) had none either. Their raincheck system (a web browser based thing in the back of the store) wouldn’t work either. But, the manager used the Unisys again and is getting one shipped to me from Denver. I just hope it can do landscape shots as well as Doug’s can.

LAN party tomorrow… getting ready.

Monday, Doug and I hiked up to Lewis Rocks, or what Ian calls South Mountain Falls… both names are equally applicable. The lighting was awesome, and we got some great wallpaper photos. Wow, my camera is pitiful in quality compared with Doug’s ;).

Tuesday, the last piece (motherboard) arrived for my Oak upgrade. I proceeded without much problem (except for nearly destroying the processor via misapplied heatsink… my thanks to the A7V8X motherboard for shutting the machine off when it detects the processor is about to melt…). Oak is much faster processing-wise, and transfer speeds have improved, but are not quite at the media-limiting point.

Isaac and Ange organized a Capture the Flag event, which I was able to attend. I think they had 16 people at peak, divided over two teams. We got three games in between around 11:00 and 1:30. Due to the moon, only the last game was *really* dark. And this morning, the family went to the Silver Springs Flea Market. I didn’t get anything except for my usual breakfast sausage… most of my past purchases had been junk for treehouse assimilation, and that pretty much came to an end when I started working.

Well, I spent (wasted?) most of the evening working on my Thinkpad R40 review, which, no, isn’t yet done.

That having been said, Ship got new toys to plug into toys, including a huge Brocade SilkWorm 12000 switch. All I have to say is… I hope it supports SNMP.

In preparation of Doug‘s upcoming LAN party I’ve had to order some parts for computer upgrades. I’m currently running a GeForce 2 MX 400 (64 MB) which is a few generations behind the times, and it started showing its discontent for UT2k3 at last year’s LAN party. Since there is a UT2k4 out this year, I’m clearly doomed. So, I ordered a GeForce 4 TI 4200 (128 MB), a step back from Ian‘s 4600, but should still prove acceptable. Also… realizing that UT2k4 needs something like 5 GB of drive space, I had to do something about the 30 GB drive in Pine. I considered augmenting it with the 10 GB in my FreeBSD/Solaris x86 test box, but that seemed pretty horrible. Trying to run the game off of the network looked equally grim. So… back to pricewatch it was, and a new 80GB SATA drive should be headed my way. Pine should be happy.

Of course, Pine isn’t the only thing complaining. Oak is a bit underpowered when it comes to things like, say, transferring files at 200Mbits/sec, or compiling NetMRG. So, much to Pine’s chagrin, parts were ordered to make Oak almost as powerful. I am pretty ticked that I had to pay more for RAM than last year… and it’s even not as good of RAM. So, 7 independent orders later (worst case of order fragmentation I’ve ever had) things should be fine…

Well, sorry to bore you with that, but I spent far too much time on this today to not devote an entire blog to it 😉