Archive for category Rants
Linksys E4200 and IPv6
Posted by ekrunch in Personal, Rants, Technology, Useful Information on June 27, 2011
On June 14th, 2011, Linksys released firmware update 1.0.02 (Build 13) for hardware version 1.0 of the Linksys E4200. This firmware contains the long awaited implementation of IPv6 for the E4200!
The good news is, it works! The bad news is, not with Comcast apparently. More on that later. First things first, here’s a screenshot of my current setup.
Linksys E4200 IPv6 Configuration Dialog
The first thing you’ll notice is that I had to disable the Automatic mode. That’s the “doesn’t work with Comcast” part. I put it in place, rebooted it a few times, released and renewed my IP, nothing. It could be my modem, but I doubt it. I’m using a DOCSIS 3.0 compliant surfboard which should be IPv6 compliant. Maybe it’s Comcast, but who knows?
In order to get this working, flip the “IPv6 – Automatic” toggle to Disabled, then put the “6rd Tunnel” to Manual Configuration. (The “Automatic Configuration” of the 6rd Tunnel didn’t work either.) Once you’re in Manual mode, you can head on over to tunnelbroker.net and create yourself a login and a new tunnel. (Note : You’ll have to enable ping in order for Tunnel Broker to work. Go to Security -> Firewall and clear the check box next to “Filter Anonymous Internet Requests“. This will allow ICMP requests to come through and Tunnel Broker will allow you to create a tunnel.) Once you have the tunnel created, enter the “Server IPv4 Address” from tunnel broker into the “Border Relay” field on the E4200. Now enter the “Routed /64” from tunnel broker into the “Prefix” on the E4200. (Note : You need to get rid of the “::/64″ off of the end of the field that tunnel broker gives you.) Put “64” into the Prefix Length and “32” into the IPv4 Address Mask and Save Settings.
Head over to Status -> Router and at the very bottom, you should see “Tunnel Status: Connected“. If you don’t, hit the Connect button. One thing, I did have to release and renew my IPv4 address for some reason. Probably because I was fiddling with all of the tunnel configurations, trying to get this thing to work.
Good luck and if anyone has any luck connecting to Comcast in Automatic mode, let me know. I’d love to go native instead of tunneling!
Another release of the Nikon NEF Codec, another release of “not good enough”.
Posted by ekrunch in Rants, Technology on September 26, 2010
Nikon just gave us the NEF Codec 1.10.0. Guess what it does for us? It supports their newer cameras of course. It also has a few other tweaks around color processing and distortion control.
Would you like to know what additional operating systems are supported? None! Yeah, that’s right. None! Vista 64-bit was released in November of 2006, almost 4 years ago. Yet still no 64-bit OS support from Nikon. What’s the deal guys? Adobe is all over it, with some of the software in CS5 requiring 64-bit. Where are you at Nikon? Oh that’s right, you’re doing a whole lot of nothing. I suppose you’re going to continue to be as ridiculous as Alpine and Parrot and just keep flogging the dead horse. They’re being stubborn and not supporting the newer platforms either. At least those guys are doing device level programming which can get kinky when you start to mix architectures. File format manipulation shouldn’t have these issues so it’s kind of ridiculous that Nikon won’t upgrade their tool chain and port it. Hell, release the source code, I’m sure it would take some open source developers all of about 3 days to port it for you. 
So yeah. A new release. Great! I guess we’ll just keep having to buy 3rd party software to view/manipulate NEF files or be forced to shoot the reduced quality JPG. Oh well, whatever. Everyone’s workflow uses 3rd party products now anyway. Thanks for nothing Nikon.
For reference, this is the 3rd post I’ve made on this crap. I’ve been ranting for quite a while on this subject and if you’re tired of hearing about it, feel free to write someone at Nikon. I’m certainly tired of constantly ranting about it Here’s the link to the NEF Codec product page for those 32-bit users who want to download it and so Nikon’s web guys will see this post via the referrer link. 
Krunchy’s 4TW tips for email server management.
Posted by ekrunch in Rants, Technology on April 29, 2010
While conversing with my friend over at dopplercow.com, we got into a discussion about how companies allow their users to have HUGE email boxes and other stupid behavioral patterns that they allow. It’s amazing how out of hand email has become. What started as a joke has now become a blog post, here’s some quick tips on how to successfully manage your email servers.
- Stop using email for attachments. Collaborative Document Suites 4TW
- Stop CHATTING in email. Instant Messaging 4TW
- Stop being an idiot and delete your old mail. Cleanliness 4TW
With the addendum from Chris over at Dopplercow
Allow IT to implement mail quotas.
I’ll add my 0.02 to that and say
- Allow IT to implement mail quotas. Good IT Practices 4TW
The life and death of Skunkwerkz
Having recently formed up a new company, my business partner and I had an idea one day. We’d call our development group Skunkwerkz. It was an inside joke. Nothing ever came of it until one day I needed a domain name. I was building an email archive and needed a domain name to host my old corporate email on for searching purposes. What better place to do that than on our development machines, so I registered skunkwerkz.com and set it up. No web site, no publicly reachable email accounts, etc. Hidden away from the public eye, not visible except via WHOIS, etc. Just for me, just my little thing. All was clicking along fine until one day, I got a really ugly email from an attorney.
So apparently Lockheed-Martin FUCKING SUES PEOPLE for registering domain names that “infringe their trademark” and I made the hit list. My little joke that I never intended to be publicly available apparently got found and was misinterpreted. So apparently they’ve got attorneys that sit around and dig through WHOIS or something. WHISKEY-TANGO-FOXTROT?!?!? Maybe they have a bot or something that scans for it. Whatever the case, I got a nasty gram from them showing previously won cases and a list of domains that they’ve ceased… over 100 of them. Some not even really all that similar. But apparently, you can’t use the name Skunk and Works in the same sentence without lighting these guys up.
So with that, my email archive is now moved over to good ol’ Intellidick.com where it will live out the rest of its days. The skunkwerkz.com domain has been surrendered and I’m left without anything. They didn’t even offer to cough up the $12 bucks to cover the registration fees.
Long live Skunkwerkz.com, my pointless little joke that never was going to be anything more than a URL for me to use. Oh and to all of the attorneys that have nothing better to do than sit around and scan the WHOIS registry, congratulations on being great at your job. You got what you wanted. You took away my freedom to enjoy the internet. Thanks for that.
Hey Nikon! Thanks for nothing!
Posted by ekrunch in Rants, Technology on November 30, 2009
Looks like Nikon put out that update for the NEF Codec that I was asking for.
It officially supports W7 now, even though the 1.8.0 release worked from what I read. Still no 64-bit support for Vista / W7. So hey, thanks for nothing!
Seriously though… what’s the hold up? Are you using some 3rd party library in your code that’s not available in 64-bit or are you just too cheap and/or lazy to upgrade your development tools? Come on now, 64-bit Windows is coming. Almost all new servers are 64-bit and a significant portion of Windows 7 installations will be 64-bit. Get with the program already! NEF Codec 2.0 needs to get here and it needs to be 64-bit.
Not cuil guys, not cuil at all…
Posted by ekrunch in Rants, Technology on May 29, 2009
Here I sit, broken hearted… my photo gallery is down. I happened to click the link this morning and the gallery was down with a 500 internal server error. I hit the logs and what do I see, i’m being spidered and it’s beating my web server down. There’s a new search engine on the block called Cuil (pronounced ‘cool’), and apparently it’s not very nice to the small web server owner. They advertise themselves and brag about how many pages they crawl and such… well, thanks for killing my damned web server jackasses. Your mega crawler just blasted my web server into oblivion. Now I have a robots.txt in place and hopefully that will shut this crap down. Funny, i’ve never had problems with Googlebot or any other search engine’s crawler until now.
Another fun day on the web.
Prolific USB to Serial Adapters
Posted by ekrunch in Rants, Technology on April 30, 2009
What’s the deal with these things? It seems like no matter how hard I try, I can never get one to actually work with the device that i’m using. I’ve successfully managed to make it work with an old serial swipe card reader, but that’s about it!
It also seems like completely uninstalling the Windows drivers is an impossibility. I have three different USB to Serial adapters, all made by different vendors, all using the same Prolific PL2303 chipset. The installed drivers work for ONE of them. No amount of deleting ghosted devices or clearing USB IDs out of the registry can make the other two work correctly. I’ve even tried forcing them onto the older versions of the drivers with no luck. It’s just disaster after disaster with these things, yet it seems like everyone is using this same chip set.
Yet another piece of terrible driver software accompanied by bad hardware. Any recommendations for a good USB to Serial adapter would certainly be appreciated! If anyone is into the aquarium scene and has used one with an Aquatronica controller, that would be even more helpful. Sad irony, Aquatronica sells a PL2303 based USB to Serial adapter and i’d say success rates are abysmal. I see LOTS of people complaining about them not working. At least i’m not alone!
Linksys WRT610N and IPv6
Posted by ekrunch in Personal, Rants, Technology, Useful Information on February 2, 2009
Thanks to the shoddy job that Linksys did with the WRT300N, I grudgingly purchased a new Linksys WRT610N. What a pleasant surprise! Finally another decent product from Linksys. Not that i’ve ever expected much from the bargain networking gear, but the WRT300N was very, very bad. Several of the features didn’t work consistently, new firmware was no where in sight, and the 802.11n was abysmal. The WRT300N made me regret ever upgrading from the WRT54GS, which was one of the best routers on the market and still is in the 802.11g game.
Fortunately the new WRT610N solves most of those problems. The simultaneous 2.4/5ghz radios make life really nice and performance is good. I’m now able to run all of my 802.11n gear on 5ghz while 802.11g stays on 2.4ghz. Each radio can also be restricted accordingly. Very handy. Well done Linksys. The updated features of the firmware are always welcome as well. More granular control over the system for those who need it definitely helps. And then there are those surprise features that we get from time to time.
I’ve recently started running IPv6 on my home network for the enhanced features that are offered. Things that were extensions in v4 are part of the standard in v6 and can make life nice, especially in high throughput situations. Imagine my surprise when I was updating my Ubuntu box and noticed that the WINE mirrors’ IP address was a v6 one! So apparently, the WRT610N does IPv6, it just doesn’t tell you! This is some scary stuff folks, imagine that modern operating systems come with IPv6 enabled and people go and buy this router, not knowing that their doors are now open via a whole new protocol. Granted, most home users will never know, but I seriously wonder if the firewall in the 610N has v6 support.
Let’s hope that Linksys is one step ahead of us here or a lot of users are about to get their horizons broadened when the hackers start coming in via IPv6. 
For those who are unfamiliar with IPv6 and would like to know more, Ars Technica has a nice primer. Read more here.
Ahhhh, the joys of the standards compliance…
Posted by ekrunch in Rants, Technology on December 30, 2008
After managing to build a functional copy of MediaTomb for my DroboShare, I then found out that it doesn’t support the Xbox 360. Yay… the single device that I wanted to work with it. Oh well, I suppose I should have loaded up the Ubuntu based version first or something beforehand. According to the authors of MediaTomb, it is the fault of Microsoft. That I can believe. I have yet to do a protocol trace but I do know that most other UPnP media servers have a special switch that you have to flip to make it work with the Xbox 360. What a bummer… so much for the UPnP “standard”.
No really, it’s your fault.
When I was 18, I started smoking. Who’s fault was that? Was it the evil tobacco companies for selling and advertising their products? No. It was my fault. I was hanging out in bars with people who smoked and was trying to fit in. Sounds like it was my fault for hanging out with those people.
When I was 19, I flunked out of college. Who’s fault was that? Was it because my professors didn’t like me and had something against me? What is because I was a minority or something like that? No. It was my fault. I didn’t go to class enough. Sounds like it was my fault for not doing what I should have been.
When I was 20, I lost my job at IBM. Who’s fault was that? Was it mine because my boss was picking on me? No, it was because I wasn’t as dilligent as I should have been with my duties. I was slacking. I was young and stupid and not doing my work to the expected levels. It had nothing to do with capable, I was very capable. I was just lazy and arrogant. Sounds like it was my fault for not doing my work.
These are three examples that I felt were relvant to the current situation with my beloved country. I can’t believe how much blame everyone puts on everyone but themselves. It’s always someone else’s fault. Do I think that you should always blame yourself? No. But most of the people in my generation and the next are whiney children who got whatever they wanted and now life is starting to kick in. Life isn’t easy, nothing is free. Work for what you want and achieve it. Stop blaming everyone else for your failure. Get over and get on with life. And please, please stop teaching this garbage mentality to your children. Overly sheltering and giving them everything they want only hurts them more. Haven’t you seen enough spoiled kid movies to know that this happens?
Oh, and stop looking to other people for help. Stop reading self help books. The problem is you, deal with it, fix it. Stop whining about how you can’t and how you have to changle slowly, etc, etc, etc.. all of these are just excuses. Toughen up, it’s not that hard to have a decent life in this country if you truly stop and appreciate all of the gifts we are given as US citizen.
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