schrödinger's dog

Clubbed

The kids have been playing in the on-line game Club Penguin, which is a virtual world inhabited by penguins that can chat, dance, play games and interact. It's highly moderated and perfectly safe for kids. Safe except for the addiction factor.

Given the chance, the kids would probably spend the entire day in Club Penguin. And they particularly enjoy going on-line at the same time, seeing each other's penguin avatars, and hollering to each other about what they're doing. This means they use two computers with broadband connections. So they've pretty much taken over the Linux machine and the Mac in the downstairs office. That leaves me typing this in the living room on my laptop.

They tried it once with one upstairs computer and one downstairs computer, but the yelling between floors was getting to be too much.

With more computers than people in this house, I never thought this would be a problem.
Jim on 01.28.07 @ 04:44 PM ET [link]

D600

I inherited a pre-owned Dell D600 laptop from a recently departed co-worker. Even though this new laptop is about 3 years old, it's a much better machine than my ancient Dell CPx. There are only a few small scratches on the case and screen.

I declined our IT department's request to pre-format and customize the new laptop. Instead I installed Kubuntu Linux 6.10 "Edgy release" and created an NTFS partition for Windows 2000. Windows XP is just too touchy-feely for me.

The Kubuntu installation went perfectly. All hardware gizmos were detected without any problems including the built-in wired and wireless network adapters. Even suspend and hibernate worked perfectly the first time. And amazingly, the hardware volume and mute buttons actually work!

The Win2K installation required me to download tons of new drivers from the Dell site. I'm sure XP would have gone smoother than Win2K.

All in all it's a nice laptop. The 14-inch display is a whopping 1400x1050 pixels. Things are so small that I almost need reading glasses. It's sturdier and lighter than my old CPx, and a heck of a lot faster. Both Linux and Windows will shift the CPU speed between 600 and 1600 MHz depending on the load, thus saving power. It had 1GB of RAM installed, and 60GB of disk space, partitioned 20GB as EXT3, 20 GB as NTFS, and 20 GB as a shared FAT32 partition.

The next hurdle is getting wireless LEAP authentication working under Linux. I know it's possible, but will require a bit of tweaking.

Jim on 01.20.07 @ 01:23 PM ET [link]

Puzzling

Over Christmas my brother-in-law Bob mentioned the current Car Talk Puzzler, which asks what the longest English word is that still remains an English word as you remove one letter at a time. For example: sting,sing,sin, in, I.

I immediately sprang for my laptop and in about an hour (due to distractions of kids, TV, in-laws, and a low battery) had a working Perl script that would search an 80,000 word dictionary, trying each word and recursively removing all possible letter combinations. Once written, the script only took about a minute to run.

The longest word I found was "restarted", which degrades into "restated", "restate", "estate", "state", "sate", "sat", "at", "a". Bob sent in my answer to Puzzler Tower for me.

The official Car Talk answer was "complecting": "completing", "competing", "compting", "comping", "coping", "oping", "ping", "pig", "pi", "I". Several of those words are not even in my dictionary, but apparently they are all valid Scrabble words.

I guess I need a bigger dictionary next time.

Jim on 01.13.07 @ 08:40 PM ET [link]

Wireless top to bottom

Since the old iMac went up to the kids room last month, it has been without a network. I have needed to shuffle files back and forth by schlepping up and down the stairs with my USB thumb-drive. This wouldn't be so bad if the Mac were not so unreliable reading this drive if the data is put on with Linux. Could be a problem with the drive, I suppose.

But I broke down and bought a cheap Belkin wifi USB adapter to tie the iMac into my wireless network. Unfortunately, Belkin (or DLink, for that matter) doesn't officially support Macs. Shame on them. Luckily, Ralink, who makes the actual chipsets found in the Belkin adapters, provide Mac drivers for OS X 10.3 and 10.4. I don't know why Belkin didn't just repackage these drivers with their own name. All new Macs come with built-in wireless, but there are plenty of older ones floating around.

So the adapter works fine with the Ralink driver. It connects to my 802.11b router ($15 at the MIT flea) two floors below with no problem.

At some point the kids are going to want to get on the Net, though all they've really been exposed to so far on-line are things like the PBS Kids web site. I'll need to rig up some sort of blocking system at that point. I'll probably just route all the traffic through my Debian server.

Jim on 01.13.07 @ 11:03 AM ET [link]

Burning Map

I always like to look at the photos from each year's Burning Man celebration. I'm not sure I'd want to be there but they never fail to entertain.

Starting from Reno in Google Maps, and following the highways, I found the huge burning man site on satellite photos. They even did some nice detailed aerial photos when Burning man was in full tilt. From the air you really start to get a feel for the size of the thing. A link to the satellite view on Google Maps is here. Use the slider to zoom in and out. You can actually make out people walking in the desert.
Jim on 01.02.07 @ 08:34 PM ET [link]

Clubbed

D600

Prove It

Puzzling

Wireless top to bottom

Recipe to scare your wife

Burning Map