Why me?!?

4:15pm: Enough bread and circuses
Speaking of AmishOne's rant about creating citizens, I have a modest proposal:

Let's make Starship Troopers mandatory reading. And proven, for real, understanding.

I've never liked the idea of discrimination against the citizenship of others, because the means typically chosen (skin color, property ownership [aka wealth], etc.) don't achieve any useful goals. But discrimination on the basis of willingness to put the common good first, that's not merely useful, it's Darwin-compliant.

5:16pm:

Look honey, our puppy has a stick Continuing the pet meme...

10:02am: Cisco is from Planet Claire
So I've spent much of the last week learning to configure a Cisco access server the hard way. Most terminal server vendors have an intimidating 500 page manual that you can just sit down and read some weekend. Not Cisco. They have a 500 manual collection. And every manual refers to some generic set of functionality which doesn't match your unit (or even any actual model). And the manuals talk about strange configurations that most people don't need, but not the basic stuff. Comprehensive examples my hairy ass.

So last night I finally licked that last known major problem: all calls get kicked after 15 minutes of connect time. Cause: the outbound call dialer timeout.

WTF???

No one ever dies there
No one has a head

1:05pm: Pet meme
Ok, as long as we're doing the pet meme, here's our newest friend.

12:09pm: X10 is cool again
Ok, so home automation is a little passe by now.

If you need to automate power cycling some device under test, it's still pretty handy. The SmartHome PowerLinc controller is pretty cheap, seems to work well, and there's Linux support in the WiSH X10 package. The WiSH package is neat: it creates a bunch of specials in /dev, and you control your X10 devices by writing "on", "off" etc. into those files. Thus, you can script using pretty much any language you like. Intercal, anyone?

Hackity-hack.

8:39am: Don't force it, get a bigger hammer.
.
.
.
ats705=49538
OK
atdtSFC-VIAARR/VIAPA**r
RDest> ats300?
RDest>
ERROR

RDest> ++
OK
atz
OK
ats705=49539
OK
atdtSFC-VIAARR/VIAPA**r
RDest> ats300?
RDest>
ERROR

RDest> ++
OK
atz
.
.
.

11:06am: Farewell good friend
Last Wednesday evening we lost Seamus the killer bark-a-beagle. He had been an amazing friend for 14 years. We miss him a lot.

8:33am: Current coding project
So my current coding project is to write a unix tool to control an xcat board. An xcat board goes into a Syntor X radio, replacing the original memory module which contains frequency settings. The xcat has a serial port and can be controlled in real time, making an old but very well built radio into a frequency agile machine.

Yeah, I know, boring.

5:58pm: You know it's time to set up an LJ account when...
...even Mace is telling you you should do so.

Voila, ici est.