davemclain.com

After a long summer of no internet in the house, I’m finally waiting for the Time-Warner cable guy to get here. I started setting up the network so that I can pretty much just plug it in and have it be just like home again. Here’s a diagram of how i’m actually posting this. (yay, Visio)

I’m NAT’d at least three times between the cable box and my laptop. The packet passes through whatever proprietary OS the neighbor’s wireless is running, OSX (Internet Sharing, ftw), Linux/iptables, Libux/whatever DD-WRT uses, and finally through the WinXP network stack. I’m not sure whether my living room is an abomination or a miracle.

I am enjoying the gradual decay of the importance of traditional media, and one of the best examples of that is how terrible the comics page is in any newspaper (and the Statesman isn’t even worth the paper its printed on what with the general availability of the Daily Texan if you need to start a fire or wash windows).

The internet allows for comics like xkcd, which continually reminds me that I am not a beautiful and unique snowflake, but rather there is an entire demographic that recognizes Timothy Zahn as the name of a Star Wars novel author and is obsessed with Ron Paul (http://xkcd.com/367/).

Anyway, I happened upon this gem: http://garfieldminusgarfield.tumblr.com/
Basically, it’s Garfield but with Garfield and his lines photoshopped out. It’s now a comic strip about an insecure man with schizophrenia.

The 360 needs direct access to the internet for a few ports, which is no problem for those people who plug in their 360s into commercial routers with upnp enabled or directly into the internet. It would be too easy to simply have things work, which is why I choose Linux. Hours of work later I have

in my iptables script:

iptables -t nat -A PREROUTING -p udp –dport 88 -i ${WAN} -j DNAT –to 10.0.1.152
iptables -t nat -A PREROUTING -p tcp –dport 3074 -i ${WAN} -j DNAT –to 10.0.1.152
iptables -t nat -A PREROUTING -p udp –dport 3074 -i ${WAN} -j DNAT –to 10.0.1.152
iptables -t nat -A POSTROUTING -p udp -s 10.0.1.152 –sport 88 -j MASQUERADE –to-ports 88
iptables -t nat -A POSTROUTING -p tcp -s 10.0.1.152 –sport 3074 -j MASQUERADE –to-ports 3074
iptables -t nat -A POSTROUTING -p udp -s 10.0.1.152 –sport 3074 -j MASQUERADE –to-ports 3074

which only makes sense because I have in /etc/dhcp3/dhcpd.conf:

host jon {
hardware ethernet 00:12:5A:E4:59:1B;
fixed-address 10.0.1.152;
}

Facebook has an inordinate amount of information about our lives and its officially for sale. I just saw the following ad on my homepage…

Now, granted it’s brutally simple to figure out that that ad might be appealing to me based on my self-identification as Christian and Single, but that’s ot to say that the process can’t/won’t become much much more powerful. The amount of knowledge they have about me is truly enormous, heck this blog automatically gets uploaded to Facebook.

A while back, one of my sisters came to Austin for freshman orientation. I called her later and asked if she had gotten anybody’s phone numbers so they can meet up when they get here for real. Her response was “No! There’s a facebook group for the session, and I’ve friended everyone who I met and we’ll message back and forth.” It was at this point that I realized that I was in a reasonably tangible way culturally distinct from my sister who is only 4 years behind me in school. if Generation X was an accelerated culture, i’ve got no words to describe what that must make my generation.

Apparently Google suggestion is so psychic that from “jonathan s” it knew i wanted jonathan schwartz’s blog. I think if someone wrote a firefox plugin that successfully figured out how many words on the given page belong to whatever article is being displayed and figured out my reading speed, i could be about halfway to having a completely non-interactive internet. I would open up firefox and it would pick the first element in one of my news feeds depending on time of day, and it would then proceed to follow the links it has statistically determined i would like to follow. Naturally every fifth article or so my life would be auctioned off to the highest bidder on a 30 second semi relevant link about Microsoft’s latest CRM package or the wonders of Oracle’s latest database offering.

I am officially an addict of computers and the internet. Flaunt Jewelry and Snap Happy Cameras have both been significant beneficiaries of my recent time being locked in various floating metal tubes or waiting for various activities in the hotel room. You might be an addict if the sun is setting over the pacific ocean in mexico, on christmas eve, it’s 72 degrees outside and you’re hunched over a computer trying to make it so a form displays its controls properly after being resized.

Oh and i’m in mexico.

Schlock Mercenary is my favorite webcomic. In case you were wondering i was a nerd and weren’t paying attention when you came to my-name.com, I read 13 webcomics + Dilbert on the web daily. Anyway, today Howard Tayler posted this comic and the punchline describes my approach to apologies pretty well.

Not that I have covering fire, but I avoid apologizing until basically the person and I are friends again and the whole situation has blown over. I think the comic triggered the line of thought, but I wonder if there’s anybody’s forgiveness that I need to ask for that I haven’t.

Statistical analysis gets scary good when datasets get large. This has literally led to my music collection knowing what music I like better than I do. I was listening to the Yahoo Music radio player today because my laptop’s AC adapter died the death, and it stuck mostly to music that i already had in my collection, but then using the hive mind that they have down in the Valley (Silicon, not Brownsville) they played music that they thought I would like, and I did, a lot. For particularly good songs, I would email myself a reminder to download them.

When I got home I discovered that I had already downloaded the 2 artists’ albums I had just never gotten around to actually listening to them. This is because a month or so back I went crazy and downloaded every other album that they recommended to me, which amounted to like 8 gigs of music.

With 400 GB of storage, I kinda wish there was an option to optimistically download music so that I can sit down, tell my computer “play me music you think i’d like” and have a lag free experience enjoying unheard music and music that I’d heard but never remembered to download on my own. Oh well, I guess I’ll just have to wait another 12 months or so.

Connection to the last post: Amazon.com has made a business out of recommendation technology.

Most of you probably are already aware of the Net Neutrality debate, and the ridiculousness of some of the things that have been said.

Here’s The Daily Show’s coverage:
http://youtube.com/watch?v=SIn_J_jxf-o
And here’s a sound clip that has the whole speech:
http://youtube.com/watch?v=5b4JsgqJrrI

Hopefully it won’t clog your tubes.

http://www.penny-arcade.com/2006/06/07

The ESRB apparently have somebody who is “with it”. Hiring the authors of Penny Arcade to make awareness materials targeted at gamers is absolutely genius. I would guess that half the people reading this are outraged that the Hot Coffee mod even exists and the other half are ticked about the anti-gamer, anti-free speech and largely ignorant backlash. Wherever you fall on the “spectrum” i hope you can appreciate the awesomeness of leveraging Penny Arcade to raise awareness of the ESRB ratings on video games.

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