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now for experimental purposes
Friday, July 9 2010
The coyotes were wailing again last night almost exactly as they did the night before. There definitely seemed to be a connection between moonrise and the onset of their vocalizations. I'm already starting to grow accustomed to their commotion and it doesn't unnerve me as much as it did only yesterday.
The heat wave continued, but it had mellowed, with highs topping out at around 90 degrees Fahrenheit. Gretchen had a friend over for lunch and I wasn't in a mood to be social, so (as I've occasionally done in the past) I holed up in the laboratory. I needed to be working without distraction on one of my several web development jobs anyway.
I've decided to use my Netgear WNDR3300 router (which now runs an open source firmware) for experimental purposes (maybe as a mast-mounted wireless bridge, perhaps to receive free WiFi from Ray when he gets his new house two miles away down in Old Hurley). To replace it as the household WiFi Access Point, today I took delivery of a ZyXel X550NH, a router with 802.11n capabilities and gigabit ethernet ports. One of its chief selling points is its ability to prioritize traffic to the WAN port, which might help with the serious internet slowdowns we experience when I am uploading files via FTP (or using Bittorrent to do anything).
(The most puzzling of these slowdowns are the kind that attend FTP uploads. Uploads, after all, only tax an internet connection's upstream bandwidth. So whey then does it so deteriorate the speed of downloads? I've never read an adequate explanation of this phenomenon, but I suspect it has something to do with some block of code written in the 1980s that nobody at Microsoft has ever seen fit to revisit.)
Nobody has yet managed to get an open source firmware running on the ZyXel X550NH, though it does have its own Unix-like operating system called ZyOS which can be interacted with via a telnet session.
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http://asecular.com/blog.php?100709 feedback
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