Author: David

Over-educated Curmudgeon, Bit-Bucket Tuner and Budding Brewmeister.
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Techie Woes and Wins

Fair Warning: this is a light “techie post”. Nothing heavy, just an equipment upgrade yarn.

So, my very nice Netgear WPN824 802.11b/g MIMO router began being a bit finicky about accessing its web management interface, and, wanting to demonstrate excessive over compliance with keeping my own network equipment up to snuff, since it gives me extra ammo to rub in my ISP’s face *heh*, I purchased a Linksys WRT160NL 802.11b/g/n router to upgrade my lil network with.

Note: the Netgear was showing no packet losses across my home network, and was seemingly rock solid otherwise; in fact, it will serve nicely, I think, as a “breakout” switch, with the DHCP and wireless functionality turned off. Oh, and I’d switched my cable “modem” (it’s no such thing. It doesn’t modulate/demodulate; it’s a specialized router, for heaven’s sake!) earlier as well. The “old” one still works perfectly well, but my ISP can’t complain about my equipment.

Well, the Linksys router seems to be nice enough and all. Son & Heir has a snappier connection via the wireless n adapter in his Asus G71Gx-A1. (*sigh* I have to watch the envy factor. It’s a seriously cool machine 🙂 Oh, the link’s to the “A2”–whose only real difference is Win7 instead of Vista.)

Still, it could have been a better experience setting the thing up. *sigh* It took nearly an hour–yes, an hour!–to configure wireless connectivity on my Wonder Woman’s Toshiba. Don’t ask. OK, since you did (in my dreams nightmares *heh*), I’d been using the Intel Proset Wireless Management tool to manage the Intel chipset 802.11b/g adapter in her notebook. Why? Because Windows wireless management tool sucked dead bunnies through a straw on that adapter, the Toshiba maagement tool that came with the notebook… worked well on a different adapter that had come embedded in the original motherboard (which was changed out by Toshiba last year under warranty), but was even worse than the windows tool for the Intel adapter in this mobo.

Well, the Intel Proset tool could NOT negotiate with the Linksys WRT160NL any better than the built in Windows tool or the Toshiba tool could. That meant… installing the Linksys tool. And THAT meant installing the WHOLE Linksys management router management package, NOT just a wireless config tool. And for some reason, it took 30 minutes to install the frickin’ Linksys software! Un. Be. Lieveable.

*sigh* Once it installed and I jumped through a few (well, a BUNCH of–man! I’m not trying to make off with the crown jewels here!) hoops, all was well. Finally. But. Getting Son&Heir’s ASUS notebook on the wireless Netgear network had been a major pain in the neck (well, actually an anatomically lower region, if you get my drift), so what, thought I, was this going to be like?

Toddled off and got his password (again–I always forget the thing and I will NOT write it down :-)), fired up the monster and… yep. Windows found the wireless network and volunteered to attempt to log on. I clicked to insert the password (which I had handy on a thumb drive) and… that was all. Muuuuch easier than the last time on his computer. Tearing my hair out on my Wonder Woman’s–a computer that’s always managed to negotiate credentials relatively simply in the past, once I used the right management tool to do so.

Well, all is well now, except for my ISP’s woeful service. On again/off again. Good stuff, then, packet losses apparently out the wazoo (well, they can’t say where they’re lost, that’s for sure–or at least haven’t bothered to find out where *sigh*).

Now, if only I could figure out why the storage link on this thing is not configuring the way the documentation says it should… Yeh, neat lil function–if I can get it working correctly: a USB connection for an external drive. I can “see” the drive I installed and create shares, etc., from the router, but not from any of the computers. Yet. Just one more thing to tinker with. (It’ll be a media share when I get it working correctly, a place to dump shows I’ve recorded so others can view them on their computers. Oh, and a bunch of mp3s and such for Thanksgiving and Xmas family time. Just pump ’em through whatever computer’s set up in living room, kitchen/dining room, etc. Easier than burning another mix CD and playing it through the EC in the living room only.)

Ah, *thumps head*. The external drive issue? *sigh* It’ll require a reboot over to the Linux side of this box and a session with PartED to fix the issue. See, although the pdf “manual” that came with the router said Not One Word about it, the NTFS formatting on the drive I connected Will Not Do. No, it MUST be formatted using FAT32! What?!? That’s an extremely inefficient file format for large hard drives! Did I say “extremely”? Oh, I can attach the thing to an older computer running an older version of Windows (XP, even) and reformat the drive as FAT32, but I want a non-destructive format. There’s data on that drive, after all. Sure, sure, I have that data duplicated–backed up–elsewhere, but really, a destructive format? That’s for the birds!

So, since I no longer have a current, good non-destructive disk management software that can reformat an NTFS disk to FAT32 on anything but a Linux box, and because this is the fastest Linux box in the house (when it’s booted on that “side”), it’s

  1. detach the drive from the router
  2. reboot into Ubuntu
  3. attach the drive to this computer
  4. start PartEd and go to town.

Now, that’s not an onerous task, but it would’ve been n ice for the documentation to say so up front, and not require that I dig through a bunch of obscurantist support pages to find it out. Oh, well. Wait. I have another drive the same size (and make and NTFS file format *sigh*) attached. I guess I could just switch those out after reformatting “this” one (which has very little data on it). Then *sigh* swap out data. But of course, I’ll still need to either take it to an older Windows machine to reformat the drive or boot into Linux, because Win7 (and Vista) disk management will NOT format a drive using FAT32. Nope. The only choices are NTFS and exFAT, which will NOT be seen as FAT32 by the router. Or, and I suppose this would be the most efficient tack, I could simply clean off the little data on “this” drive, swap it out for the other and use the Linksys management interface to format the drive. I suppose. *sigh*

Oh. Well. Another day. 🙂

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Shocker! “Fake But Accurate” CBS News Rediscovers Some Degree of Journalistic Integrity

Swine Flu Cases Overestimated?
CBS News Exclusive: Study Of State Results Finds H1N1 Not As Prevalent As Feared

Well, duh! CBS investigates to discover that dogs still bite and governments still lie through their sharp, pointy, cannibalistic teeth.

(CBS) If you’ve been diagnosed “probable” or “presumed” 2009 H1N1 or “swine flu” in recent months, you may be surprised to know this: odds are you didn’t have H1N1 flu.

In fact, you probably didn’t have flu at all. That’s according to state-by-state test results obtained in a three-month-long CBS News investigation…

…In late July, the CDC abruptly advised states to stop testing for H1N1 flu, and stopped counting individual cases. The rationale given for the CDC guidance to forego testing and tracking individual cases was: why waste resources testing for H1N1 flu when the government has already confirmed there’s an epidemic?

Anyone who’s been following the blatant pattern of mendacious effluent issuing from government orifices concerning swine flu is unsurprised by this. My severe cold this week actually met most of the clinical diagnostic criteria for flu, but seeking a doctor’s help, perhaps resulting in a Tamiflu prescription to do what nasal rinses and gargling with salt water could do just about as well, was just silly. The course of the thing–whatever it was–would run about the same no matter what: sick for about a week and then recovery. Well, recovery’s started, although it seems I’ll need some serious but slow reconditioning to regain some stamina. Par for the course, though.

So? Was it “swine flu”? Who flippin’ cares? I was (still am a bit) sick and I’ll either recover or not. Either way is pretty much fine by me.

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And… Not Far from America’s Third World County

Step down from America’s Third World County into the land of our 42nd president:

weiner

Of course, the lovely lil village of Weiner (feel free to revert to junior high humor and snicker to your juvenile heart’s content) is several steps up from the sewers that bred our 44th “president” (who, strangely, is still running for office… ).

h.t. to JS for pointing this out to me.

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If This Is True, Heads Will Roll…

*heh* The LA FBI office is going to come under some scrutiny from its D.C. masters, and if the caller in the video below is representing a factual response from that office, heads will almost certainly roll…

‘S’all right, though. Probably 90% of the laws the FBI is involved in “enfarcing” nowadays have no real constitutional justification. (I have no actual figures, but it’s a fair shirt cuff guesstimate given what the congress and federal bureaucrappy have been up to for at least half a century.)

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The Joys of Being Married to a Literate Woman

Gotta love my Wonder Woman. Relating a news event (no, real news) that someone in our neighborhood had been shot, she correctly used “contretemps” in her dialog (yes, I was her interlocutor; I had a few questions as the news unfolded).

Well, as it turns out, the news was one of those good news/bad news situations. The guy who was shot had kicked in a door and entered a home uninvited. He was shot by a guy who lived there. So far, good news. The bad news? The guy who nailed the attacker is being charged for his possession of the gun. Yeh, he’d been convicted of a felony in the past, and so under the laws of our state was denied a firearm as a means of self-defense.

Absent any clear information on what sort of “felony” he was once convicted of, and given the growing prevalence of criminalizing behaviors that were once simply the domain of free men, I have to tentatively label his arrest for unlawful possession of a firearm “bad news”.

Oh, and how I missed the huhurah? *pshaw* I hear gunfire all the time. Guys tooling up for deer season and whatever. (We do live w/in a couple hundred feet of “city” limits and there’s no county ordinance against the discharge of firearms on ones own property–as is rightly so.) We also live just a few short blocks from the county ambulance service (it’s based at the one 24-hour emergency clinic–a new thing–in the county), so I’ve also come to pretty much ignore sirens. And the local LEOs rarely use their horns, so I’d probably not have even heard them arrive. Heck, once, when I made a report of a disturbance next door to me (during the gladly brief years of “the bad neighbors”), six county mounties showed up with nary a peep between ’em.

So, good news/bad news that I might not have heard about for a couple more days were it not for my literate and very well “plugged in” Wonder Woman cluing me in.

Oh, and on top of the news, I got to hear a word I rarely hear in conversation, used appropriately–and pronounced correctly to boot. Gotta love her.

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Clash of Civilizations?

This is another re-post, this one from November of 2006, recalled for service as a result of the comment in a post earlier today, “Of course, the largest part of the problem is the way Islam has codified the savage tribalism and bent toward irrationality that is endemic in the region.”

Just a few off-the-cuff thoughts on the putative “clash of civilizations” between the West and Islamic societies.

First, let me define what may be an idiosyncratic view of civilization that may find echoes of sentiment in some folks, at least. I recognize that “civilization” (a rather recent word in the English language, as such things go) was coined to refer to a society of “city dwellers,” and that’s about it. But I would submit to you that any society that is truly civilized must recognize and embody certain fundamental principles. Leading those principles are:

1. Private property rights.
2. Rights of persons to life, liberty and the pursuit of their own goals, insofar as those goals do not infringe on the rights and property of others.
3. A government concerned with protecting these rights against outlaws–both within and without the society.

By any measure, especially the principles noted above, one can see that if Muslims can be said to be civilized at all, it is a most crude, rudimentary and severely flawed “civilization” they own, indeed. Property rights? Islam is clear that property rights are first and foremost for Islamic men, almost to exclusion. Oh, dhimmis can own things in Islamic countries… as long as some greedy Muslim man doesn’t decide they want it instead (following Mohammed’s treachery, rape, pillage, butchery and enslavement of the Jews at Medina, et al.). In Islamic society, regardless the false protestations of “moderate” Muslims, it’s essentially a pack mentality where top dogs rule.

Of course, given human nature, Western societies have a degree of that sort of thing, as well, but property rights (well, until Kelo) were at least protected with a fair degree of evenhandedness under the law for most of the history of Western civilization. In fact, the progress of true liberalism in Western civilization can be fairly traced largely in the restriction of the greed of the powerful to legally “steal” from the weak. Continue reading “Clash of Civilizations?”

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About Afghanistan…

Camille Paglia, of all people *heh*, has articulated my own view rather well, although I have a small difference of strategy with her:

Let’s get the hell out! While I vociferously opposed the incursion into Iraq, I was always strongly in favor of bombing the mountains of Afghanistan to smithereens in our search for Osama bin Laden and al-Qaida training camps. But committing our land forces to a long, open-ended mission to reshape the political future of that country has been a fool’s errand from the start. Every invader has been frustrated and eventually defeated by that maze-like mountain terrain, from Alexander the Great to the Soviet Union. In a larger sense, outsiders will never be able to fix the fate of the roiling peoples of the Near East and Greater Middle East, who have been disputing territorial borderlines and slaughtering each other for 5,000 years. There is too much lingering ethnic and sectarian acrimony for a tranquil solution to be possible for generations to come. The presence of Western military forces merely inflames and prolongs the process and creates new militias of patriotic young radicals who hate us and want to take the war into our own cities. The technological West is too infatuated with easy fixes. But tribally based peoples think in terms of centuries and millennia. They know how to wait us out. Our presence in Afghanistan is not worth the price of any more American lives or treasure.

I still think it’s worth the time and treasure to bomb the hell out of the Afghan mountains that form a refuge for the Taliban and al Qaeda. And it might not be a bad thing to periodically swing back around that way and carpet the mountains with more Big Berthas until they’re mostly gravel. Just cos.

As for, “…outsiders will never be able to fix the fate of the roiling peoples of the Near East and Greater Middle East,” well, almost. Outsiders have done rather well for historically short periods of time (multiple decades) by partitioning the warring tribes and sects and punishing those who stray from their corners. Such a technique might well work in Iraq, if coupled by a “democracy” that is more republican than democratic, allowing the various tribes and sects to have representation in an overall federation via traditional tribal/sectarian leaders, not by openly democratic elections. In Iraq, it would have a fairly good chance of at least fostering a more or less stable government at least until the next strong man emerges.

But continuing to play “democratic nation builder” with the tar baby of millennia-old tribal and sectarian feuds is a plan for failure, IMO. The only large groups in that area even remotely interested in a more or less Western style representative democracy are Israel, the Kurds (~) and, to some degree, Turkey–because of the still powerful lingering effect of Kemal Attaturk’s example. The rest? Not even the relatively more civilized notional country of Iraq is anywhere near ready for a genuine Western style representative democratic republic, IMO.

(Of course, the largest part of the problem is the way Islam has codified the savage tribalism and bent toward irrationality that is endemic in the region.)

I see others hold similar views, apparently having learned the lesson of Santayana’s Axiom, where most have not. Had I been keeping current in my reading (alas, a monster of a cold has set me back), I would have seen Jerry Pournelle’s comments and his posting of the very relevant “FORD O’ KABUL RIVER” by Kipling, sho knew a thing or three about the peoples of Afghanistan… which things have not changed much since Kipling’s day.

Kabul town’s by Kabul river —
Blow the bugle, draw the sword —
There I lef’ my mate for ever,
Wet an’ drippin’ by the ford.
Ford, ford, ford o’ Kabul river,
Ford o’ Kabul river in the dark!
There’s the river up and brimmin’, an’ there’s ‘arf a squadron swimmin’
‘Cross the ford o’ Kabul river in the dark.

Kabul town’s a blasted place —
Blow the bugle, draw the sword —
‘Strewth I sha’n’t forget ‘is face
Wet an’ drippin’ by the ford!
Ford, ford, ford o’ Kabul river,
Ford o’ Kabul river in the dark!
Keep the crossing-stakes beside you, an’ they will surely guide you
‘Cross the ford o’ Kabul river in the dark.

Kabul town is sun and dust —
Blow the bugle, draw the sword —
I’d ha’ sooner drownded fust
‘Stead of ‘im beside the ford.
Ford, ford, ford o’ Kabul river,
Ford o’ Kabul river in the dark!
You can ‘ear the ‘orses threshin’, you can ‘ear the men a-splashin’,
‘Cross the ford o’ Kabul river in the dark.

Kabul town was ours to take —
Blow the bugle, draw the sword —
I’d ha’ left it for ‘is sake —
‘Im that left me by the ford.
Ford, ford, ford o’ Kabul river,
Ford o’ Kabul river in the dark!
It’s none so bloomin’ dry there; ain’t you never comin’ nigh there,
‘Cross the ford o’ Kabul river in the dark?

Kabul town’ll go to hell —
Blow the bugle, draw the sword —
‘Fore I see him ‘live an’ well —
‘Im the best beside the ford.
Ford, ford, ford o’ Kabul river,
Ford o’ Kabul river in the dark!
Gawd ‘elp ’em if they blunder, for their boots’ll pull ’em under,
By the ford o’ Kabul river in the dark.

Turn your ‘orse from Kabul town —
Blow the bugle, draw the sword —
‘Im an’ ‘arf my troop is down,
Down an’ drownded by the ford.
Ford, ford, ford o’ Kabul river,
Ford o’ Kabul river in the dark!
There’s the river low an’ fallin’, but it ain’t no use o’ callin’
‘Cross the ford o’ Kabul river in the dark.

“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”–George Santayana

and

“In a democracy (’rule by mob’), those who refuse to learn from history are in the majority and dictate that everyone else suffer for their ignorance.”-third world county’s corollary to Santayana’s Axiom

And, as someone at Pournelle’s site commented,

“Some days reading the news is like living in a Flashman novel.”

*heh*

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“____’s Got Talent”

The ____’s Got Talent franchise is apparently pretty widely spread, but some countries seem to have gone beyond the limited model I’ve seen portrayed on America’s Got Talent and Britain’s Got Talent. The Ukraine version, for example, featured this winner:

Now, let’s see someone win for sculpting marble on stage…

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Oh. Wow. Will the Idiocy Never Cease?

Anti-“blasphemy” regs trump the First Amendment. What part of “shall make no law” is unclear to The 0!? Just more “Sit down and shut up” from The 0!’s White House.

While attracting surprisingly little attention, the Obama administration supported the effort of largely Muslim nations in the U.N. Human Rights Council to recognize exceptions to free speech for any “negative racial and religious stereotyping.” The exception was made as part of a resolution supporting free speech that passed this month, but it is the exception, not the rule that worries civil libertarians. Though the resolution was passed unanimously, European and developing countries made it clear that they remain at odds on the issue of protecting religions from criticism. It is viewed as a transparent bid to appeal to the “Muslim street” and our Arab allies, with the administration seeking greater coexistence through the curtailment of objectionable speech. Though it has no direct enforcement (and is weaker than earlier versions), it is still viewed as a victory for those who sought to juxtapose and balance the rights of speech and religion.

Hmmm, if The 0! is serious about pushing this, expect an effective nullification coming here in the U.S. of

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

Coming soon to a court room near you: