Personal Blog of Ryan Gibbons

I’ve haven’t used a manufacturer’s  firmware on my router in YEARS. Seriously since like 2003 or 2004. I started of using OpenWRT, which was the first one out there of this kind. It allowed you to run Linux on your Linksys router. This was freaking awesome. I used, loved it, and might of fried one or two routers in the process :/

Since then there have been several different spin offs and IMHO, better ones out there. For the last several years I’ve been running DD-WRT on my Linksys WRT54G (The same one that I originally put OpenWRT on, fried, and then fixed). I found myself need to extend my wireless network, but not in the normal since of wireless. I need to turn a switch into a wireless client so I could have a hard wired connection on the other end.

I started searching for a new router, one that would last me a while, and more importantly. One I could hack. The short of a very long process for me, I settled on a ASUS RT-N16. This thing is loaded, 32MB of storage, 128MB of ram, and480 Mhz processor. It supports B, G and N. Pretty nifty. I got it, fired it up. And spent just enough time in the Asus firmware to load up DD-WRT.

I took my old Linksys and converted it into a wireless client. So no, it is just one huge switch. What I have is the wireless portion of it is just like the wireless in a laptop, and it connects to my router. Then all the ports on the back are just like a normal switch. I can now plug my desktop computers in my office up to it, and they are all on my network. It’s a pretty slick setup.

The connection between the Linksys router (now switch) and the Asus router is a bit flaky at times. And this is because of a multitude of reasons. The biggest being the number of walls the signal has to travel through. But I am working on fixing that one (moving the Asus router out of the bedroom one day). The other problem is the DD-WRT firmware on the Asus router. The router requires a beta release of DD-WRT running the 2.6 kernel. Older versions used the 2.4 kernel. But to support a wider ranger or routers (including this Asus) they had to use the 2.6 Kernel. There are still some bugs, and some things are quite working like they are suppose to, but that is why it is a beta release.

Overall, I am very happy with everything. As long as I can resist the temptation of tinkering with them. The connection remains really stable.

Time for a new theme. There are still some things that need to be ironed out, and just flat out updated. But over all, I like this look and feel much better.

This one is much brighter and welcoming then the other one. Which was had a grunge look and feel to it, with muted colors.

This one was provided by Woo Themes

This isn’t anything too new, but just a few switches I use with my chrome install. This is more or less for my documentation, but I thought it might help others.

First, Pin Tabs, while this isn’t anything new, a switch allows you to pin the first number of x tabs. This is beneifical. I have my blog, e-mail’s and Google Reader open in tabs and use this to make them all pinned on startup

--pinned-tab-count=5

Now this next one is for a specific extension SpeedTracer, a lot like yslow for firebug. Well, to make this one work you need

--enable-extension-timeline-api

So that’s it, nothing ground shattering. But definitely useful.

I’ve had an account on Stackoverflow.com for almost a year, but haven’t done much with it. Last night I set up my account on both Superuser.com and Serverfault.com and went through and answered a few questions. I got to admit, this is pretty cool. I enjoy helping out where I can, I’ve done it on the Gentoo Forums for years. This is cool because the questions are a bit more broad .

If you are a geek, and you haven’t spent the time to check this out yet. I highly suggest you do. And I don’t mean just using it for answers (because it is great for that). Go through and see if you can help out with any. The first few responses I was a bit nervous about. But once you get past it, it isn’t too bad.

I’ve never given character sets and encoding much time. I half way understand how it works, which for me is unusual. I normally have to understand things at a level that lets me talk to the subject fairly well. And sadly, this one I don’t. I don’t have the time or energy to really dive into it right now, but it is on my list. I will talk briefly about what I have found in the last 24 hours about this.

MySQL allows you set to set the character-set and collation to utf-8. To my understanding this will allow you to store UTF-8 data in your database. This makes it really nice when you have users copying and pasting data into your CMS. It will store the special double-quotes, trademark symbols, and pretty much anything else you can throw at it. No big deal to backup up, right? Well I did an export within PHPMyAdmin and using the mysqldump utility. Neither one worked, and I was pissed. And actually so was the client because I didn’t catch it before we launched the site. So last night I was frantically searching Google as fast as I could (notice I wasn’t searching the web, I was searching Google – that should make an interesting blog post for another time). And I eventually found my answer. It had to do with the mediums inbetween the export and import to support utf-8 characters – Great.

So without having to use a 3rd party app, or write some code, I was able to figure out how to do it with myqldump. Instead of using the greater than symbol to redirect the output into a file, mysqldump has a switch -r to use to redirect output into a file. They say to use it on Windows machines, so I kind of felt dirty for using in the linux command line :/ But I did, and guess what, an import using virtualmin on the production server and everything worked, the data came across cleanly.

From the brief reading that I did, using the power of output redirection at the unix command line can break UTF-8 encoding. I guess it kind of makes sense if the server or terminal you are using doesn’t support it. But it isn’t something I would really think about.

Just for those wondering what I ended up doing. I normally do a mysqldump like

mysqldump -u user_name -p database_name > mydump.sql

This time around, i just had to change it to

mysqldump -u user_name -p database_name -r mydump.sql

So simple I could throw up.

I’ve found myself using Chrome more and more has the days go by. It starts up faster the firefox, tabs open faster, and the pages open just as quick, if not quicker. There isn’t much to dislike about Chrome, even flash plays well. I still keep firefox around for several things, web development, certain stubborn websites, and delicious.

I have seen the postings on Delicious Bookmarklets before, but I thought they where cheesy and not really want I wanted. Well I finally broke down and read about them while I was waiting on a call from a client. And low and behold, they are actually pretty nice. I now have two links for Delicious in my bookmark bar. One is to add a tag to delicious and the other is to view my Home, which is a feed of your links.

The only thing it is truly missing is a way to pull in your bookmarks. But I think this is a good thing. It will keep me from using Delicious as my internal bookmark tool, it will move it more towards what it is, and a socializing bookmark tool. Links that are specific to this machine I’m on, or links that aren’t important for me to remember elsewhere will go there. They will be true bookmarks, while my Delicious links are will become more of a socializing way to share links with friends and family. Things I will want to pull up elsewhere, not my payroll company or a link to the google chrome release blog

Just thought I would give my two cents on the matter and an initial endorsement on the whole Bookmarklets thing.

I was lucky enough to make it out to the CodeWorks 2009 Conference that stop be in Dallas this weekend. This was my first programming conference to go to, and I had a blast. You can view the schedule of talks that I attended. I didn’t make it out to the Saturday talks, but I did attend all day Sunday. Got there a little before 09:00 and didn’t leave until around 18:00 (6:0o pm). The talks where good, and the attendance was pretty nice. A bit more then I actually thought would show up. The staff was very friendly and the facility was nice.

I don’t know if I had a favorite talk. The XDebug was pretty informative as I have never used it before, and always wanted that level of debugging. The PECL talk was also very interesting, it was a lot less formal then the others. It was part open forum , part talking about some of the lesser known extensions under PECL. I am glad I attended this one as it really pointed out some cool extensions that could really save some time developing. I also really want to check out the cario one as it looks like you could make some really nice charts and graphs with this. Also the Design Patterns talk was interesting. I knew of Design Patterns, but never really saw the use to take the time to learn about them. Well, after attending the talk, I am going to force myself to read more about them now. The speaker,  Cal Evans, suggested the book, and it sounds like the de facto standard, Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software.

The lunch was great, provided by the Dolce. Afterwards Microsoft provided an open bar with some hot hors d’œuvre. I couldn’t pass up the opportunity and had an ice cold Shiner Bock and some chicken on a stick. It was a great way to end the day.

I’m trying not ignore my blog, while there is plenty to talk about, I just can’t find nothing to provide a unique view of. I guess the purpose of this is to just put it out there anyways. Maybe one day I will :0

As for now, I am playing a bit with WordPress. I’ve started to use tags, and added the (in)famous tag cloud. I’ve update the tags on the last ten posts or so. I’m also working on a few other pages, and possibly adding a few widgets.

I’ve been using linux since around 2000, and I’ve been using it has my only operating system since 2003. Since that time my knowledge of programming, systems and open source community has grown immensely. I’ve always tried to help others on the Gentoo forums when I have a chance, and provide feedback where I can for the developers.

Fast forward a few years, and now I am finding myself provide the patches and helping with some minor development. It is crazy , but how such a small task, can really make you feel good. When you find that patch, that bug, or provide a feature that wasn’t already there.

I think that is what drives a lot of people with Open Source. It isn’t that the software is free, and some it isn’t even the principles behind it, it is simply the enjoyment of working on something and helping out towards something that is bigger then you.

I know I am not the first to write about it, but wow. I think everyone suspected they where going this direction, but now that it is actually here, it is pretty cool. Some people are meeting it with skeptism, some are happy. I am excited for the changes that they will bring. They have a huge pool of talented developers, and the OS will be open source.

While it is hard to trust google, and what they are monitoring while you would be using their OS, I welcome the change. The OS market is was developed when there was no internet , at least not how we know it today. Think of the Palm’s Pre and how superior it is over the iPhone b/c Palm centering the OS around the web. Andriod has a lot of the same feature. And now the Operating System. We no longer use one machine to manage our data. Hell, I use two machines just at work. No including the data and process that I work on in a server.

You can read more at Google Official Blog Post.

I can’t wait to play with it.