Fiber Optic Networking

Burlington has gradually been rolling out a Fiber Optic network in Residential Areas and neighborhoods. This service is available through Burlington Telecom. This is a municipal utility that is offering Cable, Phone, and Internet on the cheap.  I’ll probably be switching.  It’ll be interesting to see how much faster it is than my current connection from Adelphia.  It’s also got symetric speed for Internet service.

Fedore Core 5 and Ndiswrapper

So I’ve upgraded to wireless on my desktop because I’ve gotten to frustrated with having constantly run an ethernet cable from my bedroom through the kitchen to my living room.  I went with a Dlink DWL-G120.It’s a smaller USB 2.0 based network adapter with a long cable so you can move it to get the best possible reception.  The adapter is based on the prism54 chipset that does have some Linux support that is currently in development.  I chose to use Ndiswrapper to use the Windows driver because it will be more stable.

The driver that was included on the CD (Version 2.00) that came with the adapter did work after a little bit of work.  It didn’t work with the latest version of Ndiswrapper,  and the latest Fedora kernel but it did work with Ndiswrapper version 1.18 and kernel version 2.6.17-1.2187_FC5

Lots of Changes

This past summer I’ve been extra lazy about updating my blog.  In May I moved to Burlington Vermont and started work as an embedded software engineer at Goodrich in Vergennes.  Vergennes is a small little town south forty minutes south of Burlington right on Lake Champlain.  Its a great place to work, co-workers are great and knowledgable and I get to work on a variety of different tasks on a day to day basis.   I also purchased a new truck this past summer, a 2005 Chevy Colorado.

I also did a lot of traveling and have picked up digital photography as a new hobby.  Because of that I’m debating about writing a new photo management program/hacking f-spot because f-spot just can’t handle my 2 gigs of digital photos that I’ve acquired over the course of the past couple of years.

I’m not sure if I’ll be at the COSI Alumni Open House but I know I’ll be in town the weekend before.

Fedora Core 5

I installed Fedora Core 5 yesterday.  The new installer is a bit of a step up, it’s nice to see it using Yum instead of RPM.  It seemed a bit slower though,  I didn’t time it when compared to Fedora Core 4.  The hardware support seems a bit better than previous versions.  The install worked the first time on my NForce chipset which usually crashed using previous versions of any installer.

Gnome 2.14 is a big step up in speed than previous versions and the new Fedora theme is a lighter and easier on my eyes than previous versions.  It’s a pretty good upgrade.

Switched my blog

Finally switched my blog away from blogger.com.  It was a good service but the feeds coming off of it weren’t well formed, and most of my posts ended up looking like crap.  I ended up moving to a wordpress.com account.  It’s running the latest version of wordpress which is what I’ll be using this summer whne I switch to a dedicated host thats probably running a Xen image.

It’s been a while

A whole lot has happened in the past three months since I last updated my blog. Maybe I’ll get around to keeping it updated with some of the stuff that I’ll be doing for class and COSI. Probably not though, as my track record is turning out to be worse then Donnie’s.

• Took a Software Engineer position with Goodrich in Vergennes Vermont. If you don’t know where Vergennes is, its about 30 minutes south of Burlington.
• Went to Poland to visit one of my friends for two and a half weeks. It was a pretty good time, but unfortunately way to short. Spent most of my time in Warsaw, but I also did spend a couple of days over New Year’s in Zakopane. I’ll be posting pictures eventually but first I’ve got to get a domain name and some web hosting. (That’ll probably get setup during the course of the summer)
• Their are renovations scheduled for the COSI Lab this summer. The biggest highlight is the windows between COSI and the ITL. We’re also getting a machine room for all of our servers that is right in there.
• Helped deploy Fedora on the the lab machines last weekend. Currently it’s running pretty well and was much easier to setup than Ubuntu or Gentoo. We’ll be switching over the build in the ITL at some point in the next week.

At Least I’m Not the Redneck

Pre-Hyptnotized Peter

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A Break for the Ages

Got break from a great fall break last night. Had a good time, managed to get out of Potsdam for just under a week. Visited a couple of my old friends from high school and caused a bit of trouble at Geneseo.

Did a bit of hacking on Xen related stuff, but not to much as I was generally disconnected from the internet. I didn’t get to do the IBM Mainframe challenge due to the generally suckiness of Adelphia Powerlink. It kept on going up and down about every 5 minutes throughout the day on Monday. Pretty shitty, but probably doesn’t matter because I wouldn’t have enough time to complete part 3.

And my OSDL contest entry is a bit larger than last year. I’m going to be working on hacking the Linux OOM Killer and possibly implementing Xen Overcommit support so you could swap entire domains in a fashion similiar to z/VM.

The new hotness

Earlier this week my laptop decided it was finally time to die. Monday morning the video card decided to stop working. After a couple of days of using ssh to connect to my laptop I decided it was a good time to get a new machine.

I ended up getting a new 12 inch iBook. It’s pretty sweet and I like it alot. I also purchased iWork after trying Keynote in the store. And yes I drove all the way to Syracuse because I couldn’t stand to wait a week for Apple to ship me a laptop. I’ll probably be posting some pictures later on this weekend.

Live 8

Made the long road trip to Philly on Friday afternoon to go see Live 8 on Saturday. It was an awesome show and definitely worth the trip. I’ll have some of the pictures that have actually turned out posted in the next couple of weeks. I did manage to fight my way through the crowd up to the first big screen.

Hopefully George W actually gets the message, but he’s not exactly the sharpest knife in the drawer so who knows. In other random stuff I did manage to wake up early enough to go see the Liberty Bell and Independence Hall (I’ve got some pictures of that to)