Stefan Lasiewski

Warp Records- Great electronic Music
Your guide to money in the US Elections

Version Control with Subversion

I’ve been in a cave for a few months, and only just noticed that Subversion is a real 1.x product now.

Has anyone used it? Any reviews out there?

One of the more recent trends in the Internet world is the concept of Social Network’s and the Semantic Web. Social Networks are supposed to make it easier for you to interact with friends and communities online and make the web function more on a human scale.

Some of us remember Six Degrees, who tried to do this years ago and went under, and are coming back with a new site. I have had email lists for this sort of thing going for over 10 years now, and participated in newsgroup-type systems years ago, done the personal webpage thing, etc.

The Social Network sites offer great feature over my old, archaic mailinglists– Friend-of-a-friend networking, personal journals, the ability to form interest groups, etc.

I’m looking to settle on one or two sites for my journaling wants. I’m looking for a Blog/Journal; flexible look-and-feel; User communities so I can talk to people with similar interests, ask technical questions, etc.; and a Friend-of-a-Friend service. I’d like the service to be indexed by search engines so that I’m not just speaking in an echo chamber.

Here is a short list of the communities I have participated in recently. There are dozens (hundreds) more:

• Friendster - Probably the most well known. A “Bulletin Board” serves as Blog function. Site is slow as heck.
• Tribe.net - Like Friendster combined with Craig’s List and a heavy influence of Burning Man. Pretty cool. Event listing, classifieds, but no journal capability! Arg!!!
• Orkut - Invite only, which makes it more scalable and more “elite”. Closed to the outside world which means that non-member’s can’t use your information at all.
• Livejournal - One of the first Blogging sites. Confusing interface.
• Blogspot/Blogger - Like LJ, but with a great flexible look-and-feel.
• Slashdot - I have a ton of friends and foes on this site, but the journaling aspect leaves alot to be desired.

Here is my problem. There are many (too many?) social networking sites. Each site is isolated within it’s own separate universe, with little or no interaction between the various sites. The lack of interaction adds an artificial barrier within the whole social networking idea. If one friend uses Friendster another uses Tribe, and another uses Livejournal; there is no interaction between these tools.

Likewise, I will post this journal text to the journal in each of my social networking accounts as an experiment. Unfortunately, the responses to each individual journal entry will remain separate, with no social interaction between the readers.

So my choice is to:

• Use all of the sites (too much work!)
• Look at different sites, become overwhelmed and give up (This is where I’ve been for the last several years)
• Pick one and stick with it
• Do it all on my own server, run it over my DSL line. This is also alot of work, and it there is no way for me to participate in the FOAF’s out there.’

Arg, what to do? What to do?

This site has a bunch of free designs for wireless antennas. You download an image, print it out, glue the antennas together and then mount them.

Simple, cheap, effective.

http://www.freeantennas.com/

I finally got a wireless network. I was waiting for the equipment to come down in price. TigerDirect had some refurbished 802.11b D-Link components for sale. $20 for the router: A D-Link DI-514, $15 for each of the D-Link DWL-520 network cards. So I bought them (still waiting for the refund from D-Link).

I installed the router, installed the DWL-520’s (Which came with the wrong Driver CD!), configured everything and off I go!

For the most part the network works great, but sometimes Windows 2000 will crash into a Blue Screen of Death with this message:

DRIVER_IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL

*** STOP: 0X000000D1 (0X0191A400,0X00000002,0X00000001,0XF828B908)

*** NETR33X.SYS - Address F828B908 base at F827B000, Datestamp 3ecdaf93

Annoying as heck. Now, note that NETR33X is the driver for many D-Link cards, including the D-Link 520.

These crashes only happen my network has alot of traffic. I’ve been trying to use Bittorrent to download the latest version of Red Hat Fedora Linux, and the crash usually happens when my download speed goes over 150 Kb/s.

Well, while troubleshooting this and downloading Fedora at 150 Kb/s, I received a phone call. We have one of the cheap common Uniden cordless phones. As many of you know, many cordless phones transmit at 2400 Mhz. The 802.11b and 802.11g wireless networks *also* transmit at 2400 Mhz.

So I pick up the phone, listen to the caller, and there is alot of noise. I know that the Uniden and my wireless network transmit on the same frequency range, so I try to change wireless channels on the Uniden phone. I hit the “Channel” button, and at the exact same time, boom — Blue Screen of Death.

It looks like the D-Link cards have trouble dealing with wireless signals from other devices.

After changing channels on the Uniden phone, there have been no crashes at all. My Bittorrent has even reached 170 Kb/s ! Yes.

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