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Hey guys! I’m back from my hiatus of trudging the road to nowhere… busting my ass in worthless classes with jaded professors (well, there was only one – the others were great), and working hard. Too hard; I’d rather sit back and do nothing most of the time, but I don’t. I hit the snooze button ten times, get up out of my warm caccoon into the harsh cold reality of life, gulp down my coffee, and head into work an hour and a half late. Some days I have school or studying to do, but it’s all the same. I’ve become extremely jaded lately and I have an attitude problem. Maybe it will make for interesting posts.
Also, just FYI – the Felony Franks interview went well. It is going to be extremely difficult and time consuming to edit, and unfortunately I’ve been too busy to do it yet! Soon the videos will be up though. Be patient.
Now for the main course, tomorrow night. What the hell will you be doing? Something lame I’m sure, and I’m glad I won’t be there with you, however if you would care to join me for a night of good bands playing hardcore, punk, blues, jazz, ska, bluegrass, and basically none of that actually… just straight good music and a lot of people in a small, old dirty shitty bar in Elgin sweating and spilling beer all over themselves. I’m a deicated whip operator so I won’t be drinking, but I am entertained by all of it.
Here’s the flyer - come on down! $10 a show, $15 a day, $30 for the weekend I think.
Check their website for details: http://www.cassettedeckmedia.net/iansparty/
We’re still doing the interview with Felony Franks, or more specifically Jim Andrews – the owner. That’s actually not what this micro-post is about though; I wanted to bring a news story to your attention if you haven’t already seen it. Jim Andrews wife contacted me today in reply to an email I sent her stating that the news story I was waiting on had finally broke and it made the first page of the Wall Street Journal! You should check out the article if you get a chance at http://online.wsj.com/article/SB125538779820481255.html?mod=WSJ_hpp_MIDDLENexttoWhatsNewsThird#articleTabs%3Darticle
There’s a good discussion still going on, and you can join in on it if you subscribe to the WSJ site (it’s free). I’m happy to see that national attention has been brought to this issue which really boils down to the name “Felony Franks” and the fact that a lot of people don’t like it for what ever reason. I don’t understand why people don’t like the theme – those hot dogs painted on the side of the building are very personable, and I kind of feel bad for them.
But let’s get down to the brass tacks here. The media attention is good for three reasons. One – it draws attention to the fact that there is a large amount of reform needed in the area of felony laws, especially those relating to non-violent and “victimless” crimes – if you can say that. Two, it further exposes corrupt politics in Illinois and Three: It exemplifies and exposes the [sometimes] insurmountable problems facing small business owners today in America. The alderman has absolutely no right to deny Jim Andrews his right to put a sign up nor does he have the right to deny him the zoning approval to do the curb-cutting for a drive through. On another note, Father Pfleger, who has always been missing a few nuts and bolts needs to keep his mouth shut. Obviously he doesn’t understand what’s going on here, and I’m making it my personal goal to do a whole string of articles dedicated exclusively to him and his misdeeds.
Anyways, if you have questions you’d like to ask Jim, leave a comment and I’ll see if I can squeeze them into the interview. If not that, maybe support him by stopping by and grabbing a bite to eat with some friends one of these weekends – after all, the food is “So Good, It’s Criminal.”
-Dan
I, as a computer science student have the liberty of taking whatever lab sequence I feel like. Physics is recommended because it’ll apply to some of the computer science theory you learn later, but I didn’t feel like taking physics. Chemistry is obviously better because if nuclear war ever broke out and all hell broke loose, you’d have the opportunity to make bombs and poisons to use on your combatants (a.k.a. the people who don’t fit into your anarchic system). You’d also be able to make a variety of drugs and other useful substances… Physics just isn’t as interesting or useful in scenarios like that!
This week I became interested with sodium and it’s inherent instability. It’s readily available in many compounds such as NaCl (table salt). Really, all you have to do to separate the Na from the Cl is melt the crystals and subject the liquid to electrolysis. Here’s my procedure:
DISCLAIMER: This procedure is just a brainstorm, I haven’t carried it out and I don’t know that I ever will. I’d be interested in your input, but unless you know what you’re doing, don’t do anything like this.
Equipment & Reagents
- Time & patience
- As much NaCl as you feel you need. You can calculate the yield by looking up the atomic weights for Na and Cl – if you’re having trouble doing that you shouldn’t do this procedure… just buy the Na.
- Carbon electrodes and several car batteries wired in series.
- A large glove box (preferably one you can modify and that can withstand a mild explosion)
- Powerful air conditioner.
- Kerosene
- Wire
- An electrically nonconductive container capable of withstanding thousands of degrees Celsius of heat
- A noble gas… helium will work and is readily available
- Heater hose (probably)
- Any other stuff I forgot to mention, like tools for modifying the glove box.
- Oh yeah, oxy-acetylene or oxy-mapp and torch kit.
The major concerns in this procedure are: A) Sodium is highly explosive, especially in its powdered form which is what you’ll be dealing with. B) You’re going to be using an extreme amount of heat right next to an alkane (kerosene) which is pretty flammable. C) The electrolysis of liquid NaCl gives off Chlorine gas which will kill you if you inhale it and D) The amount of electricity gets extremely dangerous when you start connecting batteries together in series.
So, you’d modify the glove box to have a permanent ceramic dish with the NaCl in it, then have a MAPP or Oxy-Acetylene burner positioned strategically underneath it so as to have it at the right temp, but not too high. Modify the air conditioner so that you have hot helium coming out and cool helium going in. Everything is perfectly sealed. Separate from that is the helium input; it must first flood the box, then step it down and just have some positive pressure. Another hose should vent out to the roof or somewhere where nobody is present, and there should be a fan blowing on the end of it so the Chlorine gas doesn’t get too potent. Do it on a windy day I guess!
I know I’m going to forget something, but let’s move on to the next part. Take the batteries and wire them in series into the box connected to graphite rods. The graphite rods should resist corrosion and be able to withstand heat well… You’ll have a vat of kerosene (preferably actively cooled somehow) inside the helium-flooded box, but not too close to the flame. The kerosene won’t ignite without oxygen, but it could get a little to hot for comfort and start to dry off or even boil. When the Sodium particles start to form on the anode you’ll have to take it out, let it cool for a second, then brush it off in the kerosene. Rinse and repeat. Once you’re done, leave the cooling mechanisms on as well as the helium flow and the ventilation. Let this whole set up cool down to room temperature then disassemble everything. You will have pure sodium in a powdered form as a sediment at the bottom of the kerosene vat. Take note that powdered sodium is very dangerous just due to it’s huge surface area – it’s subject to explosion at any time. You may wish to develop a procedure to melt it and then mold it into a bar, but you may be able to do this in the kerosene with simple pressure… I know it’s very malleable at room temperature, but I’m not sure if you can get the particles to smash together or not, you may need heat.
Don’t ever try this, and don’t assume it’s correct because I haven’t tried it. I just thought it up. Maybe an electronics engineer could help you robotize this whole thing with the use of a camera so you don’t have to be anywhere near it and you can do it on a grander scale. Just a thought.
-Dan
This is pretty cool, I have to say… useless though. There is no on-screen keyboard and no way to hook up an external keyboard via USB either, so at this point it’s nothing more than something kind of cool that you’ll use maybe once then promptly uninstall.
The app is available for jailbroken iPhones only obviously, and it’s available through Cydia. It’s called “Windoze” so search for that… It’s in the xSellize repository, or you can install the .deb package manually through the terminal if you so choose. The package (which includes both OS images) is about 35MB.
I have to give the author(s) of the original program called “Bochs” some credit though. It’s an open source IA-32 emulator that works on most operating systems… read more about it on their site. Definitely a pretty cool project, but the port to the iPhone lacks value. I can definitely see value in the app if it had proper input interfaces, but it doesn’t so all you can do currently is point and click and even that doesn’t work too well.
I thought I’d share some screenshots I took, we’ll start with Windows 3.1 then do Windows 95:
 Here's the Bochs icon, right next to FB which I use rarely. After adding the xSellize repo in Cydia and installing windoze, this is the icon you’ll see on your iPhone.
 Initial Bochs/iPhone Screen Choose your image…
 Info Screen Thanks, xSellize for giving the original author credit. There are a lot of stolen applications floating around out there, but this isn’t one of them. I have yet to try the original emu out, but I’m a fan of DOSBox for my old games like Doom2.
WINDOWS 3.1 (Even though it says 3.11, I was hoping for networking)
 Bochs loading up on the iPhone Now you tilt your screen and let Bochs load. Windows 3.1 loads pretty fast, probably even on a 3G or first gen.
 Bochs continues to load the disk image... Hey I remember SMARTDrive! No need for that anymore.
 The Windows 3.1 Startup Screen Ahhh, I remember you. The nostalgia starts kicking in right about now.
At one time, people would type “win” after DOS loaded fully (windows was installed on top of dos… a program essentially) then people just said %&*# DOS and added that win command to their autoexec.bat files. Good thing whoever made this image did the same because you can’t type in windoze for the iPhone.
 Loading... kind of like an 80386
 All loaded up. Here’s the long lost program manager shell. People used this for a long time, well into the 90’s. Ask me sometime about the FOB Chinese guy I worked with at Motorola who was given a very thick Toshiba Satellite complete with a 3.5″ FDD and windows 3.1 to do his job a couple years ago in… 2006. Yeah it was 2006, wow. I’ll never forget that.
 MS-DOS Prompt Whoops! I clicked the MS-DOS icon, now I have to exit the app and restart it because I can’t type “exit.”
 File Manager  Windows 3.1 Games  Minesweeper was my favorite.  It was hard to click the square, so I gave up :'( WINDOWS 95
 It loads just like Windows 95... because it is. Not too large of an install huh – 99MB. Gone are those days. I think my first Windows 95 machine had a 6GB drive in it and 16 or maybe 32MB RAM. It was a Pentium 133 (HP Pavilion) which ended up breaking several times before they gave us our money back. I kind of miss those days, I was in sixth grade well actually I got it during the summer after fifth grade. I was to go to a new school, which was when things took a turn for the worse for me. If only I could go back, I would change so many things. But I have no regrets – yeah right.
 Windows 95 Startup Screen Yeah, the bottom bar does it’s little animation. Very cool to see on the iPhone.
 The Windows 95 Desktop, on the iPhone The first time I started it up it started in safe mode, but after I restarted it it resumed in it’s normal mode.
 Standard Start Menu stuff  Dammit, can't they make the network connection work? It’s not so different from IE6 which way too many people still use. I wished the internet connection would’ve worked, not that the IE5 or whatever it was experience would be better than the Safari Mobile experience. The iPhone should’ve included a stripped down version of flash though and an embedded JVM – at least on the 3GS which can handle it.
 Control Panel, Kind of The Control Panel icons take about a second each to load once they get going on the 3GS. I wanted to try to increase the mouse speed, but none of the control panel applications would load! I think I would have just had to wait a long time, but I had things to do.
 Windows 95 on iPhone Shutdown Screen Always shut down your computer the way Windows tells you do or you could damage your computer.
 Please wait while your computer shuts down. THE END.
Later this month, EloquentSpace Blog (a.k.a. Me, Daniel Kelly) and a friend of mine named Kris will be doing an exclusive interview with one of Chicago’s most unique and somewhat controversial business’ owner – Jim Andrews of Felony Franks. Felony Franks was opened recently, it’s a hot dog stand with a great theme and an even better cause – giving felons a shot at a job.
Felony Franks has been in the news several times over the course of this year, and a few people don’t like what Jim is doing because they think it “glorifies crime.” I, like most people completely disagree with that idea. I think Felony Franks is a great idea, and Mr. Andrews hit the nail on the head when he decided to hire convicted felons. In the United States, once you’re convicted of a felony you’re branded for life. You will have a very difficult time finding a job, and those who do are in many cases taken advantage of which is just not right. Whether you’re a felon or not you’re still a human being and you deserve a second chance. There are a lot of laws that need to be changed, and we’re going to expose them in the interview and it’s accompanying post.
A good case in point is a [true] story that Jim told me on the phone when we last spoke. I don’t remember all of the details, so I’ll paraphrase: There was a man driving down the highway, traveling somewhere. His destination is irrelevant, but it is noteworthy that he was an upstanding citizen. As he was driving he had to urinate, but could not find a place to stop. I’m not sure if he had a medical condition or not, but some people do – some people HAVE to go within minutes of the sensation. The man found an establishment on the side of the road and pulled over. It was not open, so he walked around to a place where he would be out of sight and relieved himself. That was that, and he got back in his car and took off. Some time later, he was arrested; the establishment that he had stopped at had a security camera which recorded his act as well as his license plates.
The story is an outrage! I can’t count on two hands how many times I’ve done the same thing myself. Sometimes you just have to go! I also heard a story of an undergrad student who was studying to become a teacher, his lifelong dream. He was out partying one night and did the same thing and was caught by the campus police. He was convicted of indecent exposure and cannot get a job teaching because those who commit “sex crimes” can’t be around children. I don’t think child molesters should ever be allowed to teach or be anywhere near children, but this was a guy with a great upbringing, good grades, and a passion for teaching.
We need your help in the form of questions. What would you like to ask Mr. Andrews, the owner of Felony Franks and a paper company who only hires convicted felons? Any questions are fair game, though we may not be able to get to all of them in the interview. Please leave the questions in the form of comments on this post – you’ll be helping out a lot!
You can also help by stopping by the Felony Franks website, and by dropping in to grab a bite to eat. Business is tough for everyone right now, and there’s less disposable income so why not put your dollars towards a good cause?
I thank you ahead of time for any comments, questions and support you give. It takes a lot of people to make a change.
 I’ve been using Linksys networking products for a long time, along with a few other brands, but mostly Linksys; Being a division of Cisco gives them a lot of street credit in the geek world. I had few problems with their switches, their HPNA products (circa 2000), etc. but I have to say, I’ve been a little disappointed with their routers over the years.
The most used router in the consumer market is by far the Linksys WRT54G(x), and that’s what I use – I actually have several versions of these, some doing hard work and others just laying around. Most of these routers I didn’t have any issues with, but I can remember a time several years back when I bought a new one and it would freeze up without failure pretty much every day. Restarting (unplugging) the router didn’t do anything to fix the issue, I actually had to push that little reset button down on the back of it for thirty seconds and reset everything. That meant I had to reconfigure all my settings every day! This was more than a little pain in the butt, and seeing that a firmware upgrade did not fix the issue I almost thought it could be the hardware – perhaps bad memory in the router. I was wrong
I Googled for awhile and stumbled upon a few different third party firmwares that could be used on the WRT54GL. It amazed me that there was such a thing, I never new that third party router firmware existed. I found several: Tomato, OpenWRT, and DD-WRT. The first one, Tomato, seemed cool and everything but not very visually appealing and the features list wasn’t too long. OpenWRT is a great firmware and it’s very extensible, but not quite as robust or as popular as DD-WRT. I’m not sure about Tomato, but OpenWRT and DD-WRT are both based on Linux. DD-WRT is based on OpenWRT. Keep in mind that this isn’t an exhaustive list of router firmwares – there are a lot of them out there. There’s even some small distributions of *nix floating around for weird router architectures that aren’t generally supported.
So at this point you might be wondering why you would want to have a third party router firmware. Here’s a bullet point list of some reasons why you should use the DD-WRT firmware, if your router supports it (we’ll get to that):
- It’s easy enough for an average user to use. Just follow the install directions for your router provided on their site.
- It’s the most popular and therefore has the most support in the form of threads on their forums and elsewhere.
- DD-WRT has been through 24 major releases, plus all of the other intermediate releases. This means that it’s generally very stable and probably a lot better than whatever firmware you’re using on your router right now.
- DD-WRT provides MANY more features than what comes with your OEM firmware. We’ll get into the features real soon in the next post, but I’d describe them as being just as robust as a router that would cost hundreds of dollars.
- DD-WRT is based on Linux which means you can install new packages and log into the shell to use all your favorite command line utilities like SSH, SCP, RM, LS, PING, TRACEROUTE, etc.
- The source code is available, so if you’re a developer and you’d like to contribute or tweak something, it’s all there.
- There are seven different versions in each release ranging from micro to mega. Depending on the hardware specs of your router you may be limited to micro, or you may be able to use mega.
- I could go on and on, but once you look at the screenshots and features, you’ll be planning your first DD-WRT install in no time!
A note to the beginner, or intermediate computer user
Flashing your router with a third-party firmware requires some knowledge of networking, and the ability to pay attention to details. There is a risk of “bricking” your router if you do this wrong, so you’ll want to make damn sure that everything you do is correct and that there isn’t some sort of a power disturbance during the install. You’ll have to search around on the DD-WRT site to find an install guide for your router, if it’s supported there will be one there.
In order to set up a wireless router, you will also need some information from your ISP to get things working properly. If you use Comcast, the setup is very simple; the WAN side just gets a DHCP assigned IPv4 address, and you set up your WIFI and LAN as you normally would. DSL users will need to know all of their login credentials, etc. Most of this stuff is either in your computer (if you don’t have a router) or on your router. Just log in and grab it! If you have a T1, you can still use this – I’ve seen it done! Just take note of the subnet mask, routable IP addresses and DNS servers.
All the extra features are a little more geared towards people who know what they’re doing, but I encourage you to jump right in and start playing around with them too. If you have the time and the willingness to learn, this can be a very fun adventure for you.
Finding a router / checking if yours is compatible
DD-WRT.com has a cool little AJAX page that will allow you to search for your current router, or a router you’re thinking of buying. It’s on their supported hardware page. Under where it says “Router Database – Beta” enter in your router’s model number and without even clicking a button, some routers should appear on the page. Find the one you’re looking for and check if it’s supported. If nothing comes up, or it says it’s not supported, you’re out of luck – try another firmware maybe. If it says work in progress, it might be awhile, but eventually you will be able to use DD-WRT on that router.
The Best Routers for DD-WRT
Linksys WRT54GL
 Linksys WRT54GL 1.1 Right now there are three routers that are considered to be the “best” for DD-WRT. The first one is obviously the Linksys WRT54GL which is the current model in the line of WRT routers that DD-WRT was designed for. The current model has a 200MHz CPU, 16MB RAM, and 4MB Flash. It usually retails at around $60. This router is claimed to be the most compatible with DD-WRT, and will work right out of the box almost (with a TFTP flash). This isn’t the fastest router though, nor is it the most feature rich.
 Asus WL500G Premium V2 Asus WL500G Premium V2
The Asus WL500G Premium V2 is one of the best consumer routers on the market for the price, and it’s also compatible with the beloved DD-WRT. This router boasts two USB ports on the back for perhaps a security webcam or an external hard drive for use as a file server. I cannot attest to the functionality of it’s stock firmware, but I do know that it’s hugely popular with DD-WRT. The CPU runs at 240MHz (not overclock-able as of the latest DD-WRT release). It also has a whopping 32MB of RAM and 8MB of flash memory, making it a great candidate for DD-WRT and blowing the WRT54GL out of the water. It also only retails at $10 higher or around $70.
Linksys WRTSL54GS
 Linksys WRTSL54GS Also worth mentioning is the Linksys WRTSL54GS. It is compatible with DD-WRT and is a lot more powerful than the WRT54GL, but it’s no longer on the market. If you dig around on EBay you may find one, but you’ll probably pay an arm and a leg for it.
The router has a 264MHz CPU, one USB port, 32MB of ram, and 8MB of flash memory. These specs put it in the ring with the WL500G Premium, but unfortunately Linksys decided to stop manufacturing them and hand all the profits over to Asus. I guess it doesn’t surprise me though, and I’m sure Asus’ stock firmware is much more capable and less buggy than the Linksys firmware – I hope.
 Buffalo AirStation WHR-G54S Buffalo AirStaion WHR-G54S
The Buffalo AirStation WHR-G54S is perhaps the most sought after router out there. It was the best bang for you buck, and a cheap router for DD-WRT. It was pulled off the market in the USA along with all their wireless products because they were sued for patent infringement by the Commonwealth Science and Industrial Research Organization (CSIRO). Buffalo is a cool company because they like to push things – some of their products actually used to ship with DD-WRT already on them!
You can find these on EBay once in awhile, but the price usually shoots up pretty fast so you might try to find one that’s listed poorly (if other people can’t find it the price won’t go as high). Paying higher than normal prices for this one kind of defeats the purpose of buying it in the first place.
The specs are: 200MHz Broadcom 5232, 16MB RAM, 4MB Flash. I don’t know what the street price is or was in the USA, nor does it really matter at this point. I do know that this router was pretty cheap, under $50 if I’m not mistaken. Keep your eye peeled though, this one or something better may show up in stores again someday soon.
Could it end the still infant sharepoint era? I guess it depends on how much trust people have in the cloud. I have quite a bit – arguably too much trust in it as is reflected by my overuse of it. It is ironic though, that in a frenzy to get into the Google Wave beta thousands of people downloaded bogus virus scanners, and other malware. In essence, the spammers “poisoned” the search on Wednesday (yesterday, the release date) for “Google Wave.” If the cloud is so trustworthy then how did that happen? How did the search poisoning slip past Google for so long?
I might add that it was little more than ten years ago when the dot com bust happened and seeing how the internet is still relatively new, we may be waiting on another disaster that has yet to come. There were several Gmail outages over the summer as well, not to mention issues with FaceBook and Myspace (which in my opinion is already dead).
How much trust do you have in the cloud? Would you use it for collaboration? What company do you like better, Google or Microsoft? Do you trust Google with your information?
These are the questions people are asking themselves and others right now, and I’d like to hear your opinions on them!
The upgrade is going to be a little more complicated than I thought given the hosting environment, all the content I have so far, and the plugins and other customizations I’ve made to WP. Looks like I’ll have to back up the server again and do it another night like maybe tomorrow… But for now I need to get some sleep, I have class at 8am and a lot of studying to get done now and tomorrow plus a million other projects.
In the mean time, visit my sisters blog. She has to do it for her MBA program, so leave her some nice comments and make her blog look good.
I’m planning on upgrading to the latest version of Wordpress and doing some other tweaks tonight, so there may be some downtime depending on how smoothly things go. A few other things planned for this week aside from posts are:
- Changes in error documents
- Installing new plugins
- A few security tweaks here and there
- Some mods to the theme and graphics in the header
There’s also some great posts coming up between this week and the next, so be sure to check back periodically. Within the next two months a friend and I are going to do an exclusive video interview with one of Chicago’s small business owners who has been in the news lately. His business isn’t a not-for-profit, but it has a great cause behind it, and we’re here to support him, so you’ll know when you see it!
Thanks for the visits and all the comments!
I started getting a fair amount of traffic from TuxMachines yesterday, and I wanted to see what was going on over there so I went and took a look at what all the hype was about. Sure enough I saw a link to my article, but upon further browsing, something else caught my eye. The headline was “Boycott Ubuntu.” I thought to myself, “what could possibly make someone this angry about Ubuntu?” It didn’t take long to find an answer, and it seems that the owner of the site has a fair enough reason to cause an uproar.
Apparently Mark Shuttleworth said something along the lines of “linux is hard to explain to girls.” Now, I’m not sure what he meant by it or if he really even said it, but I’ll take the Kirrily Robert’s word for it. You can check her letter to Mr. Shuttleworth out here. I’m not a feminist, and to be honest a lot of feminists are off the deep end (in my opinion) and are completely irrational, but Kirrily seems to have raised a good point and I totally understand her frustration.
I’ll let you, the reader develop your own opinion about this whole controversy but I do want to let you know what my opinion is on this whole thing. First off, I’m not going to call Mark Shuttleworth a male chauvinist quite yet, but I do think he needs to recant, as do some of my readers. The field of engineering, computer sciences, and software development are male dominated fields, and they could use more females. It is a medical fact that women ARE different than men, psychologically and physically. The physical part doesn’t really matter when it comes to engineering, but what about the psychological part?
I don’t imagine the IQ distribution among women is that much different than it is for men, so logically it follows that women are just as capable of working in engineering. That being said, they think differently – perhaps this is why most women don’t choose engineering or software development as careers. In my previous post, “Misconceptions about Ubuntu Linux” a guy by the name of Frank posted a great comment which I’d encourage everyone to read. He mentioned that he’d worked with some women in his undergrad computer science studies at UMN and had a delightful experience. I think he’s right on – women could add new dimensions to software!
So I’d like to close with asking Mark Shuttleworth to please recant his comment or at least explain it. I’d really hate to think that this OS I love so much is headed up by a guy who doesn’t respect women.
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