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Legacy
Items
Preparations for the move are going as planned… got the utilities / DSL / phone situation dealt with today. Still on track for Friday departure.
Also, a co-worker who went searching for “People Like Us” stuff after hearing me listen to some at work has advised me that there’s a ton of their content freely / legally available. If you love the silly as I do, you must scope this. I might recommend starting with “Abridged Too Far”, which is my fav of the two I’ve heard so far.
http://peoplelikeus.org/dnload.htm
public announcement:
I gave my two (point five) week’s notice to my employer today. If the current plans hold, the weekend of the 26th will be when I pack it all into a u-haul and drive it to cupertino, CA to work for Apple. This process started in November, and today I got the green light from HR. Now it’s just a matter of paperwork, finding a place to live, and moving all my stuff.
The position is with Apple’s internal IT department; I’ll initially be doing some *nix server administration stuffs, and then potentially also helping out with desktop deployments / management. I am very anxious to get started :)
woot!
x0rx0rz
f3ll0w h4x0rz 83\/\/4r3: 7h3yz 0n 7o uZ!
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/security?rtc=1
SprintPCS for internet access
So I went ahead and purchased the data cable and an extra battery from cellphoneshop.net, pretty decent prices, though delivery took a little while. My phone is a samsung A660. There are full instructions here, but really all it requires is:
-plugging it in
-opening network prefs, where you see it recognize the phone
-edit the new interface’s settings as follows: phone number: #777, Modem: Sprint PCS Vision
That should be about it. It only takes a few seconds for it to connect, as evidenced here where I initiated some pings while it was disconnected, so it had to ‘dial’.
andre@gyro[~]ping -c 10 dreness.com PING dreness.com (69.93.125.249): 56 data bytes 64 bytes from 69.93.125.249: icmp_seq=0 ttl=42 time=5099.65 ms 64 bytes from 69.93.125.249: icmp_seq=1 ttl=42 time=5436.26 ms 64 bytes from 69.93.125.249: icmp_seq=2 ttl=42 time=4551.91 ms 64 bytes from 69.93.125.249: icmp_seq=3 ttl=42 time=3636.56 ms 64 bytes from 69.93.125.249: icmp_seq=4 ttl=42 time=2698.26 ms 64 bytes from 69.93.125.249: icmp_seq=5 ttl=42 time=1735.95 ms 64 bytes from 69.93.125.249: icmp_seq=6 ttl=42 time=935.585 ms 64 bytes from 69.93.125.249: icmp_seq=7 ttl=42 time=490.015 ms 64 bytes from 69.93.125.249: icmp_seq=8 ttl=42 time=532.631 ms 64 bytes from 69.93.125.249: icmp_seq=9 ttl=42 time=413.305 ms
You will undoubtedly notice that the web looks far worse through a sprint cellular connection. This is due to a proxy server that compresses the hell out of images. Here is a comparison of an original image vs what it looks like through the sprint cellular compression (also note the file size differences displayed in the Activity window). I’ve taken two screenshots and exported those two PDFs as jpegs @ 100% quality:
Via the real Internet:
Via the SprintPCS Internet:
The download speed is quite sporadic, but average throughput seems to hover around 3 KB/s or so, with bursts as high as 20 KB/s.
Here’s curl output for a 1.5 MB download, which included one disconnect + automatic reconnect (the download did not abort), and also a brief concurrent upload of a small file (28 KB):
andre@gyro[~]curl -O https://dreness.com/bits/cool/electricity.mpeg
% Total % Received % Xferd Average Speed Time Curr.
Dload Upload Total Current Left Speed
100 1559k 100 1559k 0 0 2951 0 0:09:01 0:09:00 0:00:00 5555
Product Endorsement
Geek alert, in the form of a quiz.
Question: What is unusual about this tcpdump output (and no, it’s not that my workstation is called pimp):
(note: displaying that as html requires this, if you ever need it)
A year
Happy new year everybody :) Much love and big ups to friends and fam, near and far. I hope you are enjoying the yule. For me, this new year’s eve was fairly quiet compared to those of recent years, and was spent on Eastlake with Damon and Amanda. Always good times :)
In the spirit of long and boring year-end posts, I hereby direct your attention to somebody else’s blog. This is just the executive summary.
Notable accomplishments for ’04 include:
- basically more of the same, which for this year is fine
- getting Amy up to seattle
- Continued (and, dare I say, enjoyable) progress in the do-it-yourself school of career training. I don’t think I’ve mentioned this here yet, but I was asked to write for an upcoming O’Reilly book about Mac OS X Server, which will be my first work officially published in print (should ship around March).
- continued (and quite enjoyable) progress with making music (note: ok, actually a bunch of notes ;)
- getting NG up to seattle from san diego. we’ve sorta gone our separate ways, but it was fun while it lasted, and I think she’s much happier here
- getting my brother out to seattle from PA. Before a few months ago, we hadn’t really been around each other much since about ’96 I guess. To my initial surprise, we actually get along quite well now.
I can’t think of any major regrets from the past year… not that I didn’t screw up once or twice, but… that’s life ;)
… and what’s coming for ’05?
- I’m not going to give it away, but it will totally rock :)
My Saturday Evening
Ambrosia recently released an OS X port of one of my all-time favorites, a centipede clone called Apeiron (observant readers may even note that this is where I stole this lj icon from… it was made many moons ago, but this particular graphic has not been changed). It’s been more than a few years since I last played it, and I think my high score was in the 700,000 range, which isn’t too shabby. Perhaps I was perfecting my apeiron skillz all this time, having unconsciously constructed some sort of elaborate Apeiron sim that runs during my brain’s idle cycles…
