The Big Giant Upgrade

(Warning: big giant geeky post ahead. Stop now if you're not interested in home networks and junk)

I've been on a bit of a geek diet over the last few years, not upgrading any of my personal IT equipment except where absolutely necessary. It got to the point where I was a bit down about my home IT setup - it did a bunch of stuff, but it wasn't too shiny. So, in the last year or so I've started improving stuff - getting new stuff throughout that I can actually enjoy and makes life better.

It started with a 24" LCD monitor for my main home computer, a linux box in the lounge room. Much nicer, and less likely to kill the kids when it falls on them than the previous 21" CRT monitor. Then I upgraded to ADSL 2+ and bought a new ADSL modem, which I ended up not successfully installing (it didn't like long ethernet, and the machine it connected to was in the lounge room, and the phone line in the kitchen). Plus, it turned out that my old modem could kind of handle ADSL 2 (5 megs connection speed vs. 7 megs on the new modem).

But recently we've ramped up the speed. To replace Ye Olde iMac in the kitchen (purchased december 2000) we bought Mac Mini and a cheapy 24" LCD monitor. This has turned out great - the kids love being able to watch the various kids movies we've ripped to the Mac, and using Front Row makes it really easy for them to control. Jen got herself a new MacBook on the cheap - it was a bargain, direct from Apple, and her work laptop is getting rather long in the tooth. Since I was heading to WWDC, I got an iPod Touch so I'd know what an iPhone was like. The other week I finally got sick of our crappy old wireless router (it had forgotten that networks should have a password, and it didn't with with the iPod Touch), so we bought a shiny new Airport Extreme router. We've now got working Wi-Fi, throughout the whole house! We also moved an external drive off the Kitchen Mac onto the Airport Extreme, to make it shareable even when the kitchen mac is sleeping.

So last night I decided to bit the bullet and reorganise everything. I was getting annoyed with the Linux box running Fedora Core 4 (I'd tried upgrading previously, but was stymied by some foul whining to do with disk labels in the fstab), since I couldn't run any new stuff on it - there aren't any decent remaining RPM sites for FC4, and I didn't really want to compile Firefox 3 from source on that old box. I started installing Fedora Core 9, and while I was doing that (waiting for disks to be fscked, etc) I re-arranged the entire house network to use the new network equipment properly.

The old layout was:

Old ADSL modem linked via 20 metre ethernet to linux box, which did NAT and shared the connection to the rest of the house. 2 hubs (100 meg and 10 meg) shared connected all the machines, the wireless devices, etc.

I've had roughly that layout for the last 10-15 years. Linux does a good job of NAT. But, so do modern ADSL routers, so the new layout is:

New ADSL router does NAT for entire internal network. Several devices connected to ADSL router, some to the airport, and some to the old 100 meg switch. Old 10 meg switch is gone. Linux box is now just another machine on the network.

Which is much cleaner, if a little alien (I've had a proper Linux machine NATing for so long that it feels weird and scary to trust a little white box to do the same job). I've still got to do some optimising. I might even have enough ports on the ADSL router and Airport to drop the 100 meg switch as well. It's all working nice and quickly.

Meanwhile, the poor old linux box is having a hard time with the upgrade. Didn't like the partition map on one drive; couldn't figure out the monitor (it's sticking to 800x600 for now), wouldn't let me log in (some dodgy old bonobo config needed purging, and most of my old gnome settings as well). Updating the thing is painful - there are a heap of old RPMs that aren't getting along with the new RPMs, so I'm doing the old RPM conflict dance. I had to give it up for the evening at about 2:30am last night, and I'll be back into it again tonight after all the guests are gone (big family dinner tonight). Hopefully I'll soon have a nice shiny new Fedora Core 9 box that still does all its old jobs properly - movie watching (piping to the TV), file serving, DAAP serving, etc.

But it feels good to have a more modern setup, even if there is a bunch of work involved. Still pondering getting an Apple TV (very nearly bought one in the US), maybe a Mac for the lounge room (moving the linux box into the Study for working and file serving on), hooking up the old kitchen mac in the library, and getting a decent machine for upstairs.

Dan's Great Ideas: Corporate Responsibility

In the world as it stands now, corporations get away with a lot of nastiness. Because they are legal entities set up specifically with the purpose of protecting their owners from legal responsibility, and with the sole goal of making a profit, they are effectively actively encouraged to break laws and exploit people when they can get away with it.

My solution:

The Shareholders Should Be Responsible

Since the measure of a company's success is its share price, and since people should be held responsible for evils at their request, then if a corporation kills someone, then the shareholders (who are the ultimate beneficiaries of the killing) should be the ones that go to jail. If a corporation deliberately poisons a town, the shareholders should be the ones to serve any prison terms (along with employees who made the decisions).

This would have the immediate effect of making corporations start behaving better, because any misbehaviour would have the effect of destroying the company's share price. Proper corporate crimes like monopolistic behaviour could be handled as they are now, but actual felonies would result in people being responsible.

Dan's Great Ideas: Justice

While chatting with a friend who is studying law, I had an epiphany. It's currently the case that people who can afford better lawyers have justice tilted in their favour. What needs to happen is:

Lawyer Handicaps!

The way this would work is that every lawyer would have a rating, initially based on his/her university marks, but as his/her career progresses it would be more based on his performance as a lawyer in court. When two lawyers go head to head in a case, the one with the lower handicap (ie. the weaker lawyer) would get less time to talk, be allowed to call less witnesses, etc. If the handicap difference was really large, then the better lawyer would get more interruptions from the judge, or might have to wear a funny hat or Groucho Marx disguise, to even things up. Objections from the weaker lawyer would carry more weight. If one side had more lawyers, you'd add up their handicaps according to some clever formula.

In this way, the current system whereby you just the best justice you can afford would be made fairer.

Late night quiet

One thing I don't get a lot of these days is quiet. It's weird right now. Nearing midnight, and it's officially quiet. The revheads down the street aren't revving, the kids and Jen are asleep, the TV, movie player and stereo are off (rare occurences), and I'm noticing how noisy the quiet is - tick-tocking clock, whir-hum of computer fans with an occasional grumble of hard drive access, high buzz of distant crickets and low buzz of a child monitor , and the occasional cheep-cheeping of birds of some description. And the clatter of a keyboard being used for indulgent reflection. And yet, I'm feeling a pressure on my ears, unused to the lack of noise after a day of work and children and life.

Big Ol' Update

Birthday Season is over, and D's was a big one. He turned 7, and his mum reckons it'll be his last big party for a few years (we'll see about that...). It was a Superhero party, so crime was fought and was evil vanquished. There was much silliness, three Ben 10s, an exceedingly self-satisfied Captain Underpants, plenty of food and games. All the kids had a grand time.

Little Bell is now walking up a storm - she's not a crawling baby any more - she's walking all the time, chasing cats. Starting to talk more. A partial vocabulary:

Buh = Bird
Bih - Biscuit
More = More
Bah = Bath
Ssshh = Fish
Dada = Dear Father
Mama = Mama
Nana = Banana
Nana = Nai Nai (milk from mama)

And it's growing all the time.

A is no longer The Angriest Toddler. He has mellowed out quite a bit and can be quite a delightful little boy. He has The Cutest Laugh In The World. His language is improving a lot, and he's starting to follow his brother's hobbies more. Both of them love their cheap $2 shop knockoff pokemon cards. Dante's into the Bionicle stuff - he's got most of the latest batch of bionicle, which he lugs around the house in a big tangle and defends valiantly from the depredations of his siblings.

I've been reading more; recently finished Tim Powers' Declare (awesome) and Neil Gaiman's Smoke and Mirrors (good in many places; a short story collection, so it's expected to be uneven). And I've got a pile of books to read.

I've also been liking my Macs more and more. Of the three machines I use on a regular basis, two are now Macs, and the other will become one once the budget can be stretched that far. And I'm keenly awaiting the release of the bloody iPhone in Oz. It's getting to be a rather tedious wait.

Well, that's enough bloggage for one evening. I've got Foot Cat craving attention, and a pile of Easter Eggs that aren't going to eat themselves and bunch of TV that isn't going to watch itself.

Toodle Pip.

Party Etiquette, Second Grade Style

D (the eldest kid) and I read "Where Did I Come From" last week, and I've been impressed with the maturity with which he has taken this new information on board. He's been quite sensible about it, and is yet to embarrass us publicly and hideously with his newfound knowledge. Though this evening he did suggest that Mrs. B and I have a bath together this evening so he could have another little sister.

But this morning I found out his thoughts about birthday parties, and invitations. We walked into school, and bumped into one of his friends, who he had invited.

D: "Are you coming to my party?"
Friend's Mum: "No, sorry, we're going away that weekend."
D: : "Well, can I have the invitation back?"
FM: : "Ummm... I didn't bring it in today, sorry."
Me: "Dante, you're not supposed to ask for invitations back."
D: "Well, you can bring my present in to school before you go away."
FM: "..."

So I explained to him that people who don't come to the party aren't expected to bring presents. He seemed disappointed. But I could see that somewhere in his head there was some equation that read:

INVITATION = PRESENT

and a notion that there was a finite store of invitations, which he had given out, so they needed to be recycled to ensure he got the appropriate number of presents.

PS. I've decided to drop the Primus, Secundus, Tertia thing on this blog. Annoyed me too much. They're D, A, and E.

PPS. E is walking! (A more precise description would be shambling, but it's still very exciting).

Sad news

Well, I'm about 3 months behind the news, but I found out today (by pure chance, while random web browsing), that Erick Wujcik is dying of cancer. I only met him once, at Necronomicon a couple of years back, and he ran a fantastic game about Pi that we didn't get to finish, but even so it was one of the more memorable games I've ever played. Apparently we (well, I) got more mathematical theory into the game than most other teams had.

It's sad news. He seemed like a really nice guy.

Spoiler: I had a grand time busily theorizing about the set of all possible machine languages that would be able to execute Pi as a program that actually does something, and cheerfully expounding about the various different infinities. I played a character called Alain Connes, named after one of my favourite mathematicians (for whom I had to completely invent a biography, because I know only of his mathematical work).