MacLin : A technologic revolution

The title of this post was though to go in the line of my previous entry of the night. It was related for me changing this website theme so no big deal here. This one is to share my experience with the new router I bought some time ago.

I was having a hard time getting connection stability with my previous DI-524 from D-Link. Last week I opened it to see if the stability issue could come from an hardware problem and I discovered that 3 of the 5 capacitor of 1500uf was cambered. I was planning to change my router anyway to get wireless N capabilities, but though I would wait for the WNR3500L that was announced in October. This router is supposed to be a fully open source router which can be flashed by open firmware like DD-WRT and have a USB port on it to connect an external drive for network storage.

My DI-524 broken, my lack of WIFI inside my own apartment and the no availability of the WNR3500L in store or online made me start searching for an alternative. The website of DD-WRT contain a database of all the routers supported by the project and in the list was an even better router than the WNR3500L, the WRT610N from Linksys/Cisco. This router also have N capabilities and USB support, having previously use DD-WRT on older Linksys routers during my years at SONIA project, I knew that I would be satisfied and the router was in sale at FutureShop, so I bough one.

Its the second revision of this router, so DD-WRT was supported, newer revision are not yet supported at the time of this writing so I have been a bit lucky. I started by using the original firmware that came with it but I was experiencing some connection drop with my IPod Touch and sometimes it would not accept the WPA2 pass-phrase and constantly asking for it. So, last night I followed this pages to put DD-WRT on my WRT610Nv2. The upgrade went well, but I must admit that during the process I got nervous, I would not have like to destroy the router and throw 150$ to the trash.

The first version of the firmware that I put on it was not very stable tough… the router was rebooting by itself at an interval of about 3 minutes. I had to use the “hold button reset for 35 seconds” to make it work and for me to return to the web interface. I passed a couple of hour trying to understand what could go wrong but based on the 3min delay before the reboot and my experience with Linux Kernel development, I assumed that it was having a “kernel panic” that rebooted the router. I though of that because the default delay for a kernel panic to reboot is 180 seconds… (well on a powerpc, don’t know if it’s the same for this router but I simply guessed) and I though it would make sense. But I can be wrong.

After looking at the router database entry concerning the WRT610Nv2, I saw that the firmware linked there was from a previous revision of DD-WRT. This revision is 13401 instead of 13575 proposed in the other page. After trying this one, the router was very stable.

When I bough the router, I also bough an external 1.5TB USB hard drive. I formated the drive as ext3 and hooked it to the router, I activated some options inside the WebUI of DD-WRT and the drive was accessible through the network as an FTP share… I did not like this way of doing so I started to look on the DD-WRT forum and discovered that some user are going with Optware to add functionalities to their router. I followed this page and after installing some packages to the router I had the SWAT interface to configure a samba share for the attached 1.5TB of storage. That’s nice because samba shares are seen in Windows, Mac and Linux !

Now I have a very good router, WIFI is back and now more secure in my home and 1.5TB is available as a storage on my local network ! Sweet!

Yep it’s been nearly a year since I wrote on this blog. It could be related to the fact that I decided to spend (or invest) my time with someone that is 100% more important than an internet site… but that is my opinion. I’ve just update WordPress to 2.9.1 so I though I should write a little about it, everything worked fine so nothing to say really about it.

Someone may ask, LaMs what did you do during all this year ? I would simply answer him… working. The reason is, I completed my degree in IT Engineering this year while working full time for Novariant. The company was in a rush during all the last year to complete the project for November. We achieved this goal, but it was hard and stressful. Unfortunately the economy problem touch our company and many of my colleagues were laid off during 2009. I’ve been lucky enough to keep my job… or maybe the skills I developed with Linux over the past few years are now what helped me to keep this job, I don’t know.

My new sport:
Beside work, I needed something new, something to help my body to get in shape, so I started DragonBoat. I did it from May 2009 to september 2009 and the 2010′s season has just begun for me last sunday with an indoor training with my new team, SuperStars.

Future of this Blog:
From the beginning of this blog I have chosen to write my blog posts in english to help me improve since english is not my first language. But the problem is that now I often write in english at work and my french is getting in a bad shape… so in the future I may do some dual english/french post or write in english or french only. I think this will depend on the subject and which audience is more prone to read it. So, probably that everything computer/tutorial/electronic/Linux will stay in english because they are prone to interest a wider audience and that DragonBoat and stuff more not related to computer will be in french… We will see.

With all the Valentine’s Day and love floating around me these day, I felt like expressing it in all my geekiness. So, tonight I wrote a simple C++ code to express how I feel about a very special someone.

Damn theme … I don’t know how to make code appear correctly … I mean with proper indentation!

EDIT: Haaaa… I found a very nice wordpress plugin to help me

#include <iostream>

#define END_OF_LIFE 80*365    // 80 years in days

int main (int argc, char * const argv[]) {

	int dayPassedTogether;
	double love = 1;

	for(dayPassedTogether = 1; dayPassedTogether <= END_OF_LIFE; dayPassedTogether++) {
		printf("Each day my love for you is incremented : %0.f\n",love);
		love += love;
		love++;
	}

    return 0;
}

Yeah, I know… a strange title, but I could not find something better and it remembered me of François Pérusse. Like you surely already know, I have a Mac and its a very nice Macbook Pro. What is also very cool when you buy a Mac, its the OS and the tools that come with it. Mac OSX is very polished, I enjoy using it everyday and Leopard have bring one of my favorite feature from a Linux that I was really missing when I switched… the virtual desktop ! OSX call it space but its the same thing, I was used to organised my desktop by “type”. For example, all web related stuff goes on Desktop #1, music stuff on Desktop #2, chat windows on the #3 and so on. Anyway, on Tiger I had to use “Desktop Manager” to get a similar feature but it had some glitch.

The OS is really nice, but what make using a Mac a pleasant experience is enforced by the set of tools that comes with it. Apple give iLife with their Mac so the customer can have a very easy to use complete media platform. With iLife you can create your personnal website easily (even if I don’t use it, its easy to understand), create your own DVD with all the menu and stuff, manage your pictures and compose your own music. Yes, that’s right ! You can compose your own music using GarageBand.

I was currious to know how this software work so I played with it a little bit. Well, I’m really not a fan of techno music… but well the beat was easy to get and I still managed to create a 4 min song.

TechnoTestGB

If you are interested in knowing a bit more about iLife and to know how to use GarageBand, Apple have a lot of tutorial on their website.

I was there, sitting in front of my media center, when I choose to take my laptop and do some research about women complexity. The first thing I did was to search on google to see how many time the topic have been used. The first link lead me to something a bit funny and a well designed animated gif.

After that I decided it would be best to analyze it my way… that means, with a lot of geekiness. Having got a course about Discrete Mathematics, where we talked about Algorithm Complexity, I though it would be cool to try to find an Big-O complexity for a women…. By the way, this post is only for fun and should not be use in reference for any thing that can be serious.

Let start:

I would like to quote a website I found, that explain in a very simple way what Algorithm Complexity mean

what does fast mean?

algorithms get slower the more items of data they deal with. that’s what we worry about when talking about algorithm speed.

a fast algorithm is one that can process a lot of data. we aren’t as concerned about which algorithm gets a certain job done first, but which would get that job done first if it involved a lot of data.

ok, so you might say an algorithm is fast if it can process a small amount of data very quickly. fine. but that’s not what i’m talking about here.

once again, we’re worried about what happens as the amount of data increases. a fast algorithm is less upset by a large amount of data.

http://www.acooke.org/andrew/complexity.html

This is a good start to understand algorithm complexity, but what the hell this have to do with women ? Well, I’m a man and I love a woman and I always want to see her happy and I’ve make it my goal. Unfortunately, sometimes it doesn’t work because it seems that I’m unable to understand her completely. So, to help myself I though it would be best to continue my research in finding a way to analyze the complexity of a women.

When I entered the words “big-o complexity women” in google, I got this …. It seems that for the women a Big-O complexity means something totally different… Well, entering “women” and “logic” inside google lead me to something a bit more interesting, I’m not sure if this Michael is totally right… but well he sure have a point when he say that a man must stay himself when dating a woman. There is another link that is fun to read.

Humm… we are still far from what I tried to do in this post… we still have to solve this “women=O( ? )”. The theory tell us that to analyze an algorithm we must observe how it behave with a lot of data. So, how could we found “?” in our equality using this statement ? Well lets search about how many data a women brain can compute. Doing some research lead me to this text where we can find that there is no significant difference between the brain of a man and the brain of a woman, so the problem is now more to find how the human brain compute the stuff. Wikipedia have a lot of information about the brain, in this entry it is said that a human brain contains 100 billions (100 000 000 000) neurons which are all linked to as many as 10 000 other neurons… That’s it ! Wikipedia gave me an answer when I was reading this section, according to Hans Moravec, the human brain “has a processing capacity of 100 trillion instructions per second (100 million MIPS).” Wow ! Thats a lot of processing power… well till the year 2030 then our personal computer may be faster…

Well, we have a number for the processing capacity, but we still doesn’t know how many information we receive in a second… So lets explore this a bit differently, we know that we have a lot of information for input but we don’t have a number… we simply know it’s an enormous amount of data. We will say it’s infinite, we learned in the link above that the brain have specific division to compute the information it receive and that each of them will divided the information into sub-division and so on. If we look at this we could think of an O(log n) complexity… but in my opinion it’s really not a good guess. A logarithmic complexity would mean that each division would use a constant (ex. always dividing by 2, like a dichotomic search) number of sub-division and it is unlikely to happen with a brain because the value change for all input. However, since the data size is infinite, we can say it would not have a too big impact so lets assume that O(log n) is a good clue. Now, when every sub-division are done with the data they send them back to be compute in group. Lost? Let me give you an example:

In a sunny sunday morning you are sitting near a river and a butterfly appear on rock infront of you. Your eyes will see the butterfly, they will send the information to the visual zone of the brain, exactly at the same moment that you ear will send the sound of the river to the auditory nerve, the freshness of the breeze will be send to your brain by your skin captor and smell of the spring will be send to your brain by your nose. The brain receive all of these informations in the same time, divided the job to every part involved then he have to mixed the result so he can analyze the new results. The butterfly may remind you of the hair clip of your girlfriend, but mixed with the sound of the river it’s now remembering you about your first encounter. Now the smell of the spring and the freshness of the breeze make you realized that you are in the middle of April, mixing all these informations together you remember that you first encounter your girlfriend the 15th of April beside a river… wait a minute your brain analyzed the information together again… man we are April 14th you gotta get a gift quick !

So you see, your brain constantly re-analyze all the informations when he got new one. So I think it would be more appropriate to think of an O(n log n) complexity for the brain. Wow, I did it, I have found a complexity for the brain. Well, it’s probably extremely inaccurate because I’m not a doctor and I don’t know it enough but well it was a lot of fun learning about all those links. Hope you enjoyed and maybe learn something.

For ending I’ll rely on xkcd.com to help me to explain my though… about love and women

PS: You may enjoy this text of philosophy its very interesting and totally different that everything I presented here.

LaMs