My heart died a little today:

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Finally, my Asus EEE Box B202 has arrived.

It is a very small computer, with its main property that it does not consume a lot of energy. This way I can get to my files and manage my downloads while I am away from home. It is conveniently stored in my hallway closet next to my wireless router and ADSL modem.

You can see a windows logo on there. I still have to remove the stickers :-) It of course runs on linux. I still have to fix an annoying problem: I cannot connect with ssh to it directly… I have to use an outside machine for that… no idea at the moment.

I finally caved in. I could not sustain the pressure anymore. Everyone has one, or knows someone who has one. With the end of the year bonus I had to buy it. So I finally have my own Wii! I am practising my tennis very hard. I need to be top notch when I am going to compete with my friends.

I really love the idea of the Wii: game play matters again, instead of awesome graphics.

I am quite a fan of wacom tablets since 7 years.  My latest wacom bamboo finally arrived at work.

Very good to see that their technology has improved even more over the years. Problem is, now I want one at home too instead of my old Sapphire :S

Well apparently my wireless post is not finished.. The ralink drivers ran fine for a while but then the lag spikes started again. The connection drops for one second once in like two minutes. In World of Warcraft it is not that big of a problem. But in Call of Duty fast connection is what you need all the time. (See my game post from a while back for more information on these games) resulting the networking cable being back in my hallway…  The laptop did not have problems so it must have been the usb adapter.

I ordered a Netgear WG311 adapter to see what a PCI card from a different company would do. Looking good at the moment *knock on wood*. When I am not leeching the news groups that is :P The connection is quite stable and fast. Lets hope it keeps it up that way.

I am using dokuwiki for an intranet on one of the sites I am maintaining. I wanted to disable certain buttons for users who are not administrators, like the profile and the revision buttons. It was for me not easy to find. Hence I am posting it here. The way I did it was editing the following in the main.php of the template:

if ($INFO['isadmin']) tpl_button('history');

Maybe other developers can use this.

It is announced! Wrath of the Lich King wil be in stores on November 13th. I am looking forward to this expansion pack. Finally I now have a date to look forward to. But first I will be on vacation of course.

A game that still has no “release date” for me is Call of Duty… I have ordered the game two weeks ago at play.com. But still I have not received it. I am quite anxious to start playing this game. I need to practice for the LAN parties that are planned in the near future.

Edit: Finally it CoD has arrived! Awesome game.

Since I live on my own, I was trying to have less cables as possible in my house. Every room had a phone wired to it. All are now removed and replaced by two simple DECT phones. Being a nerd, I need Internet. With the computer upstairs and the modem in the hall closet I decided to go wireless. So I bought a Linksys WRT54GL router and a couple of Linksys WUSB54GC adapters.

First thing that friends of mine told me that the router itself is awesome but the firmware is crap. And oh boy it was. First of all Linksys does not bother to update their drivers. When I started a torrent it would result have a complete lock up of my computer. I changed the firmware on the router to Tomato. My old dell work laptop and my ubuntu PC with the usb adapter worked fine. But my Vista desktop still had networking issues with a lot of lag spikes and sometimes just high latency. As a result I had an UTP cable lying in my hall to the closet to get some decent Internet. Very ugly but necessary.

This week I grew tired of it. My parents came by and I had to remove the cable to make the hall decent (and the rest of the house). I came across an article about using the chipset driver directly. And now I have a stable wireless connection..

In a nutshell, using linksys is okay, but use alternate drivers and firmware.

.. dont mix.

What to do if it happens:

• shutdown immediately
• remove your batteries
• put it upside down
• let it dry for more than 24 hours
• pray that the machine works

I got lucky, only the internal keyboard needs to be replaced :S

This site was hosted on a VPS I rented with a couple of friends. Of course we ran in some problems. Lots of times we had to reboot our server because it ran out of the memory we shared with other VPS’s on the same machine. At least that is what I understood about it. So we decided to buy our own server and got a good deal for hosting it somewhere. We went to Red Bus in Amsterdam to install the server over there ourselves.

Here a nice piccy for the geeks (yellow arrow):

Installing it was a piece of cake. Getting there was a different story. Mate of mine insisted on having a portable navigation system to take us there. I am old-fashioned and still do not trust those things. And of course I was right because instread of bringing us to Red Bus it took us straight to the Dam which is in the heart of Amsterdam. Fun place for a tourist but not for me who does not want to be there in the traffic chaos. But we managed.