PalmOne announced the Treo 650 in their news letter today. I hope it doesn’t come out soon - I need to save up my pennies.

Also, it sounds like TivoToGo will be released before Christmas but that upgrade will be free for all TiVo Series 2 owners, and won’t require additional hardware or dongles.

I don’t know much, but I know that somewhere, somehow, Dustin was yelling at a TV tonight.

Today was one of those days at work. If you don’t like reading a long techy rant on why things don’t work and then do work, and you aren’t really sure why, I suggest you read something else. I’d recommend MLB.com.

The new wireless stuff we’re working on is based on NoCat. It’s a Linux based AP solution for community wireless solutions, which doesn’t really apply to our environment — but it has an ‘authenticate before you can use wireless’ method which is applicable. So, I’m working on bringing that online Siebel Center. We’re planning on mimicing a similar solution CITES has deployed, and that means the gateway box is running Linux off a CompactFlash card instead of a hard drive. Yesterday, I finally had the IDE/CF hardware and an overview of what I needed to do, so today I started working towards a nocat solution for CS.

I decided to start with the CF-to-IDE cards, and getting the nocat gateway online. (The other, larger part of the project is configuring it and the nocat auth server.) This morning’s issue became getting the CF card system online, review how CITES does it, and move on. I didn’t get that far.

The CF distro CITES is running is Pebble Linux. I couldn’t get the CF card I got from CITES to work, so I created my own Pebble distro on another card, and spent the rest of the morning, and afternoon, trying to get them to boot. It kept hanging at the “Ok, booting the kernel…” prompt. It’s hard to debug that. I tried lots of different systems, thinking it was the computer’s fault. I tried different CF cards, different CF/IDE cards, moving IDE cables around… I would mount the card under another running Linux system, check it out… Rebuilt the card, no luck. I realize at the end of the day why the community wireless groups go with the CF config over the hard drives, but I am not sold as this on a solution for us, and it’s certainly a poor, poor “try it and see” developmental/test-bed environment. I spent a ton of time working on this, and thought about throwing in the towel a few times — but I figured I could look at this today. Tomorrow, I’ll move on, but today I wanted to figure this out.

Around 6:30 tonight, it started working. I don’t know why. I don’t know why it didn’t work before, but I finally got the CF card I built (not the one I got from CITES,) to boot. Then, something happened (I think I shut the box down,) and it corrupted the CF card and I had to rebuild it. It turns out pebble linux doesn’t bundle in the 3com 3c509 card I was running in the system, so it wouldn’t see the network card.

This stuff’s hard. Nothing about networking “just works” anymore.

From the bottom of http://nocat.net/moin/NoCatAuth

Pray to God almighty that he does not smote your soul for using this software.

Between setting up WEP, WPA, and now NoCat I’m really groking this wireless thing. That’s a good resume point, if I wanted to do this for a living. I feel very comfortable with the stuff now, though — maybe I should work with CuWIN and try to apply some of it for the community?

I went home this weekend and helped do something I should have done long ago. Me, along with Mom and Aaron helped clean out my childhood bedroom. We’re having family over for Thansgiving, and we need to remodel the room and just make space. Saturday and Sunday, I attacked my closet and some of the drawers and other things in my room. Many things went to Goodwill, many things were trashed, and a few things were boxed up nicely so I have them forever. I did a great job cleaning up the room (to make room for the redecorating,) but it’s a little sad for two reasons: I junked a part of my past, or sealed it away instead of it being a constant reminder in plain sight … and it means I have less and less at home. Both of these are good things, natural progression of life things, but that doesn’t make them not sad. I’m glad I had my family there to help me.

On Sunday, I found out my dear friend from high school’s mother had passed away this week. She was battling cancer for two years, and finally succumbed. I never saw her when she was sick - only when she was healthy, and full of vigor for life. She was kind, and energetic, and one of those “cool parents” that you can hang with as a teenager and not feel like you’re with a grownup. So, it was very odd for me to see her free spirit at rest at the wake on Sunday. It was great to see Lacy and Melinda again (and Melinda’s son for the first time,) but I am again sad. Goodbyes are hard.

I am thankful that I too have one of those great moms, and was able to share the weekend with her. The evening after the wake we spent making dinner, cursing at the dying deep freeze, and chatting about absolutely nothing was very, very special to me. I love you Mom and I enjoy every minute I get to spend with you.

And then I came into work today and found out Christopher Reeves has died. My first movie theater memories involve going to Superman movies — I used to hide behind the chair in front of me because anything that could paralyze superman like kryptonite was sure to hurt me. Since the superbowl a few years ago, I really wanted to see Christopher Reeves walk again. Science and progress are based on dreams like that, and I sure thought he had the money and support to have his spinal cord rebuilt. I guess the one thing that he didn’t have was time. He was 52.

I was going to post some corny lyrics to Our Lady Peace’s “Superman’s dead” song, but that seems inappropriate. What I did do, and thought was very interesting, was searching for “superman” on iTunes Music Store. The lists of artists that have sung about the man of steel is impressive - from Barbara Streisand to Eminem, and many many groups inbetween. As I write this, I’m listening to an acoustic version of Five for Fighting’s Superman (It’s not Easy).

It’s been a hard year. I’ve seen mothers burying sons, sons and daughters buring mothers, soldiers slain on foreign soils, presidents laid in State, comedians laughter cut short, and Superman killed. I think that’s more than I can handle. I pray we make it through the rest of the year without anymore sadness.

I have a 30 count box of M&M/Mars candy bars in my office to feast on when I get hungry. Not surprisingly, 30 candy bars from Sams is cheaper than the vending machines in the basement, and I always get what I want.

Until the box is running low, like now, and all that’s left are Milky Way bars. If they would have put Milky Way Midnight (A.K.A. Milky Way Dark) bars in the box, I would be happy as a clam. But I’ve decided the Milky Way traditional bars the worst thing in the box. When I looked into the box today, I only saw four Milky Way bars. Daaamn.

And then I remembered something that makes M&M/Mars rock. They hide a secret Snickers bar in the spacer/insert/cardboard divider thing in the box. Sure enough, when I removed it and peeked in side, a Snickers bar blinked back at me.

Excellent.

Mental note: Ask someone with a Sams card to take me soon.

ACM is the Association for Computing Machinery. Think of it as a geek social and professional fraternity, or as a Computer Science (but also CompE and double E) club.

They’re is gearing up for their 2004 Reflections|Projections Annual Conference in two weeks. I normally steer clear of any ACM activities either because I didn’t like the dork stigma that went with it when I was a student, and later because I’m not a student. This year’s conference impresses me — good speakers/panels, interesting topics, a good jobfair. They’ve got game designers, security pioneers, social computing neatness (Wikipedia founder, FSF, Danger and the hiptop crowd.) Ron Rivest turned down the talk, but the C and L from CRL (CS theory bible) will be present. Also, I got inside info they’re trying to get a good speaker in for Friday night.

It’s inhouse (Siebel Center) and only costs $20 for all meals, talks those days, and a tee-shirt. I’m thinking about attending … any of the geeks who follow this are welcome to come as well.

Last night, they had developers from EA Games in talking about Sims 2 development and accepting resumes. I’m impressed - ACM has a lot more interesting stuff now than when I was a student. Oooh, maybe I’ll volunteer for conference.

I think one of my goals for next year is to having something to fill out in the University Conflict of Interest Form. Anyone want to start a business with me that conflicts with time, interest, and money with my university gig?

It’s akin to the purity test, or any other form that’s designed to evaluate you but instead gives you a bunch of ideas and almost serves as a checklist. It’s the same thing with the box on the IL1040 that looks like a barn. I always want to check that one.

Maybe it’s just me.