Kirsle.net
Recently Atheros decided to make nice with Linux and contribute with driver support for Linux. That's cool, except Fedora 9 is all but almost expired and we still have nothing but a hacked Madwifi. In Fedora 10, a built-in kernel module should allegedly have the wireless card work out-of-the-box. But until Fedora 10 is released on the 28th, I'm in limbo.
On my Fedora 9 install I was reluctant to update the kernel knowing that it would break the wireless, especially while the Livna repository didn't have a matching upgrade to the Madwifi hack. But I updated it because there was a matching Madwifi this time, but that made my old (working) kernel 2 versions behind current. So, Fedora installed the new kernel and uninstalled the old one that worked. And, the wireless didn't work anymore with the new kernel.
So, I installed Mandriva Linux. Mandriva is used on the Acer Eee PCs and works heavily with Atheros hardware, and it was known that my particular wireless card works out-of-the-box with Mandriva. And it does. And Mandriva has a pretty default desktop theme. But, it's also a very annoying distro to use.
It's an RPM-based distro, but it doesn't use YUM for its front-end package manager. It uses something called URPMI, which doesn't have a very comparable interface at the command line. That's only an annoyance, but what I have a bigger issue with is how Mandriva replaces standard GNOME utilities with its own "control center" suite, which frankly sucks in comparison.
Mandriva's idea is that they wrapped all system administration tasks -- managing users, hardware, services, software -- into something similar to the Control Panel in Windows. Instead of using the already available, tested and stable GNOME programs, they reinvented the wheel. The most annoying part is that Mandriva's network manager applet really sucks. With GNOME's Network Manager, you can just click the icon on the panel and select the radio box for a wireless network that appears in the dropdown. The applet connects or it doesn't connect and it's really simple and straightforward. Mandriva's system has so much more complexity to it that of course it has bugs.
I can connect to my home network and the network at the office, but many other wireless networks, the applet just refuses to connect to. I click connect and it tells me it's making an effort to do so, but it doesn't, it just sits there forever and ever and doesn't go anywhere. The only way I found to connect is to go into some "Monitor Mode" (some advanced-looking packet monitoring thing that graphs out the network activity) and click some "Connect Wifi" button in there to get the wifi to even connect.
And, I couldn't get the GNOME Network Manager applet to install and work either. Mandriva's custom setup with the network means that the sysconfig scripts for the network devices are dynamically updated by Mandriva's own network program, so that, if I could get GNOME Network Manager to start, it wouldn't be able to find which devices to monitor because anytime I update the config scripts by hand, Mandriva overwrites them again.
Grrrr. I so can't wait for Fedora 10 to come out. >.<
But, instead, I decided to make a completely new design, called "Cosmos". I'm quite pleased with it for now. The jump from designs that were getting gradually lighter and lighter back to something very dark might cause some complications on certain pages. I'll figure that part out later, though.
See the new tutorial pages.
Also, I've created a new tutorial on how to fight off the "dumb submitter" spam bots.
And finally, I made an icon for cuvou.com. It's the icon in the corner of the tutorial pages, and the favicon.ico has been updated to be that instead of the pink GNOME foot that it previously was.
Edit: Actually, I have all the old designs online and just fixed them so they link back and forth to each other. Start at the very first design.
For some quick history, I had Comcast cable internet when I lived in Michigan, and now I have AT&T DSL (only because the local cable companies don't have lines in this apartment complex).
So, I noticed a problem when my VirtualBox virtual machines were having Internet issues. The virtual machines were Windows 2000 and Vista Home Premium, and neither of them could surf the web because they weren't able to resolve domain names.
VirtualBox creates a virtual NAT for the guest operating systems that allows them to use the host's Internet connection. The NAT has a 10.x.x.x IP range and automatically assigns an IP address to the virtual machine. This all was working just fine, but no Internet still. The results of "ipconfig" in the guests showed that my DNS suffix was "hsd1.mi.comcast.net" -- my old DNS server in Michigan.
I knew that my Linksys router was caching this information but didn't think it really mattered. Linksys was giving my Linux PC this DNS suffix as well, and Linux was passing it on to my virtual machines. The router had no interface on it to clear the cache.
At any rate, I narrowed it down that the virtual machines could not resolve domain names -- they could connect directly to Internet IP addresses, though. I tried a couple ways of "fixing" their DNS server information to no avail, and decided to reset the router to its factory defaults (to clear its cache). After a reset, I rebooted into Windows to configure it.
Linksys routers, by default, give out IPs in the 192.168.1.x range. My DSL modem also gives out IPs in this range. The only way to connect to the modem through the router is to change the router's IP range, so I've been setting it to 10.10.1.x. After setting up the router and putting in AT&T's DNS servers (which are required, or else the modem won't allow the router to reach the internet), I rebooted to Linux and started a virtual machine to see what changed.
Well, Windows 2000 still couldn't resolve domain names. I got an idea about installing a DNS server on my Linux box and telling the virtual machine to use it as its DNS -- this didn't work, because VirtualBox gives out 10.x.x.x IP addresses, which the host OS also got from Linksys. So, Windows 2000 wasn't able to route upward to the host's IP because of this. So, I instead set its DNS servers to be that of AT&T's -- the same as my router's settings. Now, the Internet worked within the virtual machine. It worked really well, too. DNS resolving time was almost nonexistant.
Realizing that Windows 2000's direct use of AT&T's DNS servers was the cause, and realizing that with the factory reset on Linksys that it had lost Comcast's DNS cache information, I tried browsing the web from my PC too. It was much faster now.
I had noticed a while back that my DSL was only slow while resolving domain names, but that once it actually connected to the server, the pages downloaded fast. I didn't make the connection between that slowness and Linksys's caching of Comcast's DNS server though. But now everything is so much faster. :)
The RiveScript.com YaBB forum has gotten at least two of these low-hanging spam bots recently. I modified the YaBB source to try and stop these things from being able to register by employing some of the same techniques that keep Cuvou.com safe from "dumb submitter bots" and we'll see if that helps...
Remind me to write a big long article about spam bots and how to fight them. I have some pretty good techniques that seem to work quite effectively but I currently don't have the motivation to write about them at this point in time.
Update: I've written an article about stopping dumb submitter bots: Trapping "Dumb Submitter Bots".
Basically, I went with a tab approach. Instead of having EVERYTHING be all on a single page, they're divided up into tabs. JavaScript tabs, so clicking from tab to tab is instantaneous. Users without JavaScript will just get a normal hyperlink to a new page where their selected tab is visible.
Also they're getting their own 400x90 pixel logos. So I think the pages are a little more fun now. :)
That's all the updates for tonight. Hopefully I wasn't penalized too much by Google for disappearing for a week. I'm pretty sure they need 404s for longer than that before they remove me from the index. ;)
Back in April I was chatting with Matt Austin, an online friend I met about 5 years ago through the hobby of chatterbot programming. He's working as a software developer at Fonality and threw out this random idea of, "why don't you move out to LA and work for Fonality?" So I was like, sure I'll check it out. If anything it'd add some more options for where I could go in the near future. Immediately the director of engineering starts chatting with me about it.
I didn't realize until I chatted with Matt some more that the director of engineering is none other than Samy, the guy who wrote the Samy is my hero worm that swept across the MySpace network a few years ago. It was pretty cool to find out that this is who I've been talking to. It was like knowing a celebrity.
Anyway, a couple weekends later Fonality flew me down to Los Angeles to check out the company, the area, and for the semi-formal interview. I hung out with Samy and Matt and their other roommate in their apartment while I was down there. The weather though kinda sucked, it was in the 50s and 60s or something that weekend... exactly the same as the weather in Michigan at the time.
At any rate, I'm going for it. I start on June 2nd as a software developer for Fonality, so the week before then is the "moving to Los Angeles" week. That's gonna be a load of fun, getting to drive through the desert and the mountains and everything. Also, since I left Liquid Web, I'm back to hosting my websites off my home Linux box again. So unless I get a new web host, my sites will be going down like a cheerleader at homecoming when I unplug my computer and won't be back up until I get settled in at LA and get Internet access there.
It's on the libcuvou page.
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