The Johnson Blog

Ramblings of a geek with a few hobbies…

Tag: Tech

  • Wireless

    Two days ago I booted up my laptop like always but ran into a slight problem connecting to my wireless network.  Thinking my wireless card was dead, I used Ana’s (same brand and model) with the same results.  Her laptop also worked flawlessly with my card.  Crap.  Driver reinstalls have done nothing.

    From what I can tell, it picks up the network just fine but it just cannot pull an ip address from the dhcp server.  Tinkering around with it more has me wondering if there’s something wrong with the cardbus slot.  I guess it really shouldn’t matter, the 4 year old machine already keeps me wired with its 5 minute battery life, what’s an extra cable for network connectivity?

    Sigh.

  • XM Radio

    We have two XM Radio receivers, one in Ana’s car and one in our family room.  Ana loves it, but until recently I just hadn’t listened to it much since the one in the house is in the family room where not a whole lot of time is spent (in the summer).  So a couple weeks ago I bought another cradle and hooked it up to my desktop in the office and I’ve been listening to it much much more.

    I’ve always liked having news (cnn, fox, etc.) on in the background while I work, so I installed Windows Media Services on my Windows server at home and setup my desktop to create a stream from the XM.  End result is that I can listen to streamed xm news all day here at work, just as if the tv were on in the background (a couple of the news feeds on XM are simply the audio steam from the tv channel).  I’ve used it for a few days now and it’s really working out nicely.  Go Media Services!

  • ejichef.com

    The past two nights I have been working up a prototype for the new Chef website.  I think it’s the best looking site I’ve done, if I say so myself.  Taking the advice of a coworker, I mocked up the layout in photoshop before touching html/css.  It sure made the process go much faster, and if I hadn’t done it this way I know I wouldn’t have ended up with these results.  Worked great.

    Now that the general layout is done, I’ll slowly move it over to ASP.NET and really work on it.  But that’ll be a while because I have to finish the Chef rewrite first.

  • ejichef.com

    Just registered it last night, will be the home of Chef when it gets rewritten.  Stay tuned.

  • Sql Server Express Edition

    I’ve been keeping my eye on this for a while now.  A couple months ago I installed it on my desktop at home to start developing my dad’s new website PBJ Unlimited and also installed a technology preview of the SQL Management Studio Express, which looks to be just as featureful as the non-express version.

    A couple days ago I checked to see if they had released a new version of the management studio and was greeted with the download for the Advanced Services  – which includes full text indexing.   All Free.  Free to use, free to redistribute.  Fantastic.

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  • Server

    Now that our network is up, I’ve decided to do a little upgrading. My new server should be delivered tomorrow and will probably end up replacing 4 old, old, old (think Pentium, Pentium II) machines running Linux. To the dismay of some I’m sure, this new server is going to be running Windows Server 2003. There are a variety of reasons, none of which are all that interesting, really 😉
    Anyway, the new machine is a horse. And a cheap one at that. It’s a Dell PowerEdge SC430 with a 2.8Ghz Pentium D (mmm dual core) with a gig of RAM. Price after the memory upgrade and before tax was something like $450. Once the machine arrives I’ll also be purchasing a couple of large hard drives and a RAID controller to use for backups instead of my old tape drive. To round out the upgrade will be a pair of gigabit switches to replace some older and failing 10/100 ones.

  • Victory (antennas part four)

    For those of you bored from this topic, this should be the last in the series Now, where was I..

    One fairly recent Saturday we decided to take my antenna off of the chimney and just point it down the road to the other person with a laptop and determine if there was any signal whatsoever coming from it. The current working theory was that the sheet metal on the top of the chimney was causing funky problems with transmission.

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  • The roof (antennas part III)

    After building the antenna mount, it had to be installed. On my chimney above my second storey roof. Now, I’ve been the first floor roof several times (think Christmas decorations, etc) without any problems; but that first trip (and second…and third.. etc.) up to the second storety freaked me out. Since Jay’s such a good pal, he volunteered to attach the antenna mount to the top of the chimney. As it was getting dark outside, I strattled the peak of the roof holding a flashlight in his direction while he attached the mount to the chimney with a whole bunch of lag bolts.

    Overall installation was quite simple (photos of both antennas forthcoming). We ran the cable down the chimney and through a new hole into my basement where we hooked it up to the access point, and then stopped for a while to eat some dinner. We were almost done!

    After dinner we went to our respective houses and started a ping. It worked. For about 15 seconds. And those were the last echos we’d see for months.

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  • antennas (pt. 2)

    In preparation for installing the antennas, we did a little research to figure out how hard it might be to aim them. Google Earth provided us the information needed to calculate the vertical angles the antennas should be sitting at. Below is a map of the two houses:

    map

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  • transpalisades is live!

    This will probably span multiple posts, as it’s a 7+ month long saga… Enjoy!

    It all started when Jay and Katherine started looking for a house and we joked about needing to have a network between them. There was so much we could end up doing – backups, shared media, games, voip, etc.. The more we talked about it, the more serious it became, to the point of where it was obviously required. (more…)