Oliver Hansen

A techie's not-so-technical weblog

Netgear Releases Router Made For Open Source!

I think I just found my new router. I’ve been thinking of getting a new one because I have problems with my current one. I’m really not sure if it’s the router or my laptop but I wanted to get a new one anyways that I could put some of the open source firmware on. Something like Tomatoe or DD-WRT… but which router to get? Linksys has been crippling their WRT54G router with less flash memory which means it doesn’t have enough space to load the popular firmwares. Whether this was intentional is open to interpretation I guess but what is definitely intentional is Netgear releasing a router specifically to be modified by whatever Open Source firmware you want!

It looks like they’ve had some packaging issues with the wrong router being sent from some suppliers but it seems they are working on it so I will soon be purchasing one of these WGR614L routers.

Download Firefox 3 Final Release Today!

So they’re trying to break some record or something with how many people download it on the first day of release but I don’t see it up on their site yet. However, if you go to the download page and just copy one of the links that is there you will see the url with the product name. Change the number to 3.0 and http://download.mozilla.org/?product=firefox-3.0&os=win&lang=en-US there you go!

I’m sure it will be on www.spreadfirefox.com soon but for now you can get it at that link!

Synchronize Host and Guest Clocks in VMware Player

I’ve been using VMware Player at work to run Groundwork which is a pretty neat network monitoring system — but more on that in another post. So one thing that was getting annoying was the guest OS (the one running on the virtual-ized system) had been losing time. I didn’t check how often but in the course of an hour it would be off by about 20 minutes at least. I knew of the vmware-tools package that was supposed to help the virtual OS run a little better and thought that would help it get the time as well. I also thought the tools were already installed but wasn’t sure. I tried looking in the Add/Remove programs but didn’t find it so I decided to move to the command line.

$ locate vmware
was enough to list quite a few files which was encouraging. I eventually found the vmware-tools in /usr/bin directory. I then ran the vmware-toolbox program and the first option I saw was “Time synchronization”. Exactly what I wanted. Now when i receive alerts about the network, the time will actually be correct. And my OCD is satiated as well.

Finally I Can Upload Photos In WordPress 2.5!

I’ve been a bit bad about uploading photos lately and I’ll tell you why. After I upgraded to WordPress 2.5 I found I couldn’t upload anything while using Linux. I tried on my work laptop which runs Vista and it worked just fine so I used that for the photos of my mom’s fence. Now that I have a new job I don’t have a work laptop at the moment so that’s not possible.

Now I had read about issues with the new WordPress 2.5 gallery upload feature that now uses Flash. Most of those issues seemed to be caused by permissions and plugins though; server-side issues. My problems are not at the server as a Windows based computer seems to work just fine. At home I am still running Linux Mint which I have run since about December. I updated to the latest Flash 10 build and I still had the same issue. Continue reading “Finally I Can Upload Photos In WordPress 2.5!” »

First Day At A New Job

Yesterday was my first day at my new job. I’m now working at the Seattle YWCA as the Network Administrator. I wasn’t sure how the first day would go really. Would I be sitting around waiting on paperwork? Would I be setting up my computer? Would I be thrown into the work supporting the network and staff? Well, it was more of actual work than just sitting around which was great. I got to see a bit of how things have normally been done in the past with setting up a new office. It’s going to be a challenge because the two people with most of the knowledge and experience in the IT department left at approximately the same time. Ed who is the outgoing Sys Admin was nice enough to come in on his last day and lend a hand setting up the new office space. Continue reading “First Day At A New Job” »