The Motorola 2210-02 is an ADSL2+ modem recently distributed by AT&T for its residential customers. It features a handsome form factor and reasonably-useful LED status indicators. As it is most commonly introduced through a PPPoE-based provider, it is sometimes necessary to switch it over to a straight ATM<->Ethernet bridge. Here’s what you do:

1. Connect your computer directly to the Motorola. Browse to http://192.168.1.254/ in the browser of your choice. If your system has assigned itself a 169.mumble address, you will first need to manually assign your computer an IP address like 192.168.1.5, a subnet mask of 255.255.255.0, and a default gateway of 192.168.1.254 to do so.
2. You should be challenged for Modem Access Code in order to change anything. This should be a ten-digit number on the bottom of the modem. It should be on a yellow sticker.
3. The Motorola will present a page prompting you for your PPPoE authentication info. You don’t need this any more, as you’re about to disable PPPoE. Click “Advanced” in the left-hand navigation bar instead.
4. Once the Advanced navigation has expanded, select “PPP Location.”
5. You should get a big red warning about the dire consequences of changing PPPoE settings. Ignore the warning and select “Bridged Mode (PPPoE is not used).”
6. Click the “Save Changes” button. Wait 15 seconds or so.
7. Switch your computer back to DHCP, hook your router back up, or whatever makes you happy. That’s none of my business; this document is just supposed to help you turn off PPPoE, not find meaning in life, achieve spiritual fulfillment, or any of the other things you should be working on.

Please note that the default Motorola 2210-02 firmware as detailed in the user’s guide available on Motorola’s site has a significantly different interface, as do the Motorola 2210-02 models distributed through BellSouth. I am located in SBC’s incumbent footprint, so the above instructions only apply to the stuff they distributed. I think the BellSouth one is 2210-02-1006 whereas the SBC version is 2210-02-1002, but don’t bet the rent on it. I mention this just in case you run into something purchased on eBay or trucked over during a interstate move.

A topic I’ve been interested in for a while now is the stampede mentality some people exhibit in regards to subjects framed as frightening. This includes handgun ownership, terrorism, hormones in food, genetically-engineered food, SARS, and a number of other supposed menaces to your personal safety that account for a very small number of actual problems. One that has come up recently at work has been the adverse effects of WiFi signals. A small but highly-motivated culture of electrosensitives and the chronically-afraid has sprung up around the radio frequencies emitted by cellphones and cellphone towers. Many have decided to associate the years-old paranoia about cellphones to wireless networking as well.

My knee-jerk reaction is that such concerns are overblown, a kind of niche-hysteria that just doesn’t make sense. WiFi access points use very little power; 100 milliwatts is typical, KSRO radio broadcasts at 5,000 watts and is just one of dozens of local radio stations. Shouldn’t we have been seeing health effects from generations of radio broadcasts irradiating us day and night without pause? So I did a little reading.

Looks like one of those great convergences where a handful of scientific studies have fallen into the hands of some highly-vocal people with a vested interest in hyping fear of this technology and a receptive media that is willing to fill (ironically enough) broadcast airtime on hyping it further.

The WiFi health scare has now found fertile soil in Sebastopol, California, where fourteen concerned residents converged on the city council to demand that a community wireless network project be shelved. This happened to be a project my employer was set to implement, more for gee-whiz factor than any real prospect of making money off it, hence my interest in the matter. Sebastopol has an interesting reputation for its residents’ collective insistence that it has an independent streak, often manifesting itself in odd ways including the overuse of political bumper stickers.

Now, I’ll concede that most of the folks that have signed onto the “new things are bad” approach to things are sincere in their intentions. Some honestly believe themselves to be affected by radio signals. Some have concerns about cancer that are amplified by family backgrounds and specific personal situations. Some are genuinely concerned about the well-being of children that are being forced to grow up in the future instead of the past. The problem here is that they’re getting played, manipulated, bamboozled, conned. There’s money to be made in RF-screening paint, curtains, gee-gaws, and even underwear. But who’d buy such things if they weren’t afraid of RF? If you’re somebody that follows links, yes, that’s over $459 for a gallon of paint.

Declaration of victory against WiFi
Observations by the guy trying to give a town free WiFi
Some British guy that’s skeptical on the matter

A proper study on the matter (PDF)

Commercial Applications Research for Extraterrestrial Technology, or CARET, is the name of the program that “Isaac” worked with during the mid-80’s. As the name indicates, they were looking into some very interesting technology that works on a significantly different set of design principles than those generally associated with Terran engineering. The kind folks at the Jimbo Propulsion Laboratories sent me a link to this interesting material which I now in turn share with you.

The photographs accompanying Isaac’s story are striking in their visual design, incorporating stark contrasts and hard angles with graceful curves at once reminiscent of a Nonokrian rune, katakana, a bat’leth, and sperm. If our military-industrial complex has been working on extraterrestrial tech, I’d like to think that it’s something as cool looking as this stuff.

More information on this matter, including a rebuttal by Isaac to a few of his critics, is available at ufo.whipnet.org.

Hey look, it’s day 500 since my last reboot:

$ uptime
08:23:46 up 500 days, 20:19,  1 user,  load average: 0.07, 0.10, 0.08

The animations I’ve seen so far for these two classic Street Fighter characters in the upcoming Street Fighter IV make me feel all warm and fuzzy inside. The Dhalsim teleport and Zangief double-suplex look great. I’d seen some screenshots previously, but they don’t tell you much about the game play. The proof is in the playing, but I’m optimistic that this’ll be a good one.

Ever find yourself sitting in Siberia with nothing but telnet and wish you could log into your IMAP server? Me neither, but just in case, you can add this bobpeers.com article to your list of handy sites.

For years I’ve used the nslookup utility to quickly confirm that something-or-other about a domain name is correct. Commands like “nslookup -type=soa” roll right off my fingers onto the keyboard not because I’m such a fine typist as because I’ve used them so many times. This has earned me some low-grade derision from Linux-enthusiasts, generally the same types that use vi for everything and cannot comprehend the simple luxury of an application like joe. But I digress. Worse than the personal snootiness is when a shell pops up nonsense like this:

$ nslookup deguia.net
Note:  nslookup is deprecated and may be removed from future releases.
Consider using the `dig' or `host' programs instead.  Run nslookup with
the `-sil[ent]' option to prevent this message from appearing.
Server:         208.201.224.33
Address:        208.201.224.33#53

Name:   deguia.net
Address: 209.204.175.65

Nslookup is deprecated, use dig. Dig does everything nslookup does, but better and uses five less keystrokes. Well… Yeah, dig will tell me what the A record is for www.deguia.net just fine. It’ll also carry along a screenfull of crap with it:

$ dig deguia.net

; <<>> DiG 9.2.1 <<>> deguia.net
;; global options:  printcmd
;; Got answer:
;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: NOERROR, id: 48163
;; flags: qr aa rd; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 1, AUTHORITY: 0, ADDITIONAL: 0

;; QUESTION SECTION:
;deguia.net.                    IN      A

;; ANSWER SECTION:
deguia.net.             7200    IN      A       209.204.175.65

;; Query time: 0 msec
;; SERVER: 208.201.224.33#53(208.201.224.33)
;; WHEN: Wed Feb 13 20:39:23 2008
;; MSG SIZE  rcvd: 44

Compare with the simple elegance of nslookup or host:

$ nslookup deguia.net
Server:         208.201.224.11
Address:        208.201.224.11#53

Name:   deguia.net
Address: 209.204.175.65

$ host deguia.net
deguia.net has address 209.204.175.65
deguia.net mail is handled by 10 mailin-02.mx.sonic.net.
deguia.net mail is handled by 10 mailin-01.mx.sonic.net.

Those two commands together caused less screen-scree than dig did by its little three-letter self. Do I want to wade through all that garbage from dig? Oh hell no. I ran the command to get an answer to a very straightforward question. If I wanted to read a novel I'd have gone to the library. Lots of information there, very little of which is of typically of use to me.

By my calculations, that's roughly a 1:50 signal to noise ratio. For every pixel of output I'm looking for, I'm skimming through 50 pixels of junk. Good old nslookup provides a 1:7 ratio. Same output for my purpose, less jibber jabber, so I waste the five extra keystrokes to save my scroll buffer a little work and keep more previous work on-screen for the moment. More recent versions of host fare well, but lack a crucial ingredient for my purposes: a warning if the response is non-authoritative. That extra couple lines telling where the answer is from has saved my bacon more times than I care to recall.

Earlier today I was perusing lawsofsimplicity.com when a message came through my inbox that reminded me of a little something I'd forgotten all about, the "+short" option. With the +short brewed into a quick little bash alias, dig behaves much more like our good buddy host, but with a lot more handy options available. The web and email content clicked in my head, and I finally find myself willing to give dig another shot.

Nevermind that link I put up. It’s rubbish for my purposes. I didn’t really have my heart set on making a Vista gadget so much as simply making an alternate means for somebody to open up a Vista box for ICMP echo response. So I loaded up a copy of Visual Basic, learned a couple things, and brewed up a simple application that tests for a firewall rule of a particular name, then allows the user to open up ICMP (if the rule isn’t already there) or close it off (by deleting the rule). All done through janktastical wshShell.run legerdemain. At first I used wshShell.exec (as it allows access to stdout), but I suppose I know better now.

I’ve got some testing to do, particularly in regards to the “publish” mechanism in Visual Basic. I’ve never used that beast before, usually just brewing up remedial scripts for use on Apache web servers, so all this business regarding signing and means of distribution are totally foreign to me. Once I’m satisfied that it works properly on systems other than my laptop, insert some means of LARTing fools that try to run it on pre-Vista boxen, and narrow down precisely which hosts I intend to let ping it (the Sonic.net latency tester and technical support IPs being obvious choices), I’ll put a little finishing polish on the text, and…

Boy is it easy to make a mountain out of a molehill. The things I’ll do to help little old ladies not have to do this.

p.s. – the escape characters in Visual Basic are retarded.

So here I am trying to make a quick little sidebar gadget. Nothing fancy, I just want to be able to tell if a specific, named, firewall rule is active, and either present a button to disable it (if it’s there) or a button to enable it (if it isn’t). This can be done handily through the command line, but requires elevation. So I search around a bit. Turns out I’m the only person on the face of the Earth that actually wants a gadget to prompt for elevation. Turns out a sidebar gadget cannot do that directly. Guess I’ll have to kludge it.

Last month I got a new computer. Nothing top-of-the-line. Nothing bleeding edge. Nothing terribly fancy, just an Acer Extensa 5620 with a gigabyte of RAM and Windows Vista Home Premium. I got a lot of raised eyebrows when friends and coworkers found out I’m running Vista now. There have been a lot of prejudices and rumors about this operating system, so I’ll address a couple today.

• Things aren’t where they used to be. Yes, new things tend to be different than old things. Change can be confusing and disorienting at times.
• Vista prompts you to give permission for every little thing. This is something everybody has known about Vista from its earliest release candidates. Well, it just isn’t true. I’m not a Microsoft apologist, but I haven’t had to give anything special permission to do anything in days. When you’re installing new software, you’re exposing yourself to some security risk, so Vista prompts you to confirm that you really intend to do it. If you want to completely reset your Internet Protocol interface, maybe something sketchy is afoot. Maybe you install four or five programs a day on your box, but I don’t, and neither do most people. Even geeks.
• Vista is a resource hog that requires way more processor speed, RAM, and hard drive space than is reasonable. This one’s totally true. Right out of the box, with minimal junkware I’m using ~800MB of RAM before I explicitly launch a thing. With only a gigabyte of physical memory, that leaves me pretty pinched. Loading up takes a while, longer with my dual-core processor than my clunky old workstation takes to load XP. At first, it seemed like running various applications took too long, also, but it looks like Vista has adapted itself pretty handily to my habits after a couple weeks. Vista is supposed to optimize its file system over time, and my experience tends to confirm that this isn’t all hype.
• Vista is a pain to upgrade to. Wouldn’t know. My old computer has a perfectly good OS on it already. Why would I upgrade it? The license for my new laptop was bundled into the price of the hardware, so whoopity-doo.
• You should really just run Ubuntu instead. Sure, I’ll agree to use Linux desktops when you agree to use Microsoft servers. Are you nuts?
• Most of the new features are things other systems have had for ages. Of the features I’m enjoying in Vista (such as the contextual search when browsing folders), this is completely true. I understand that cars had steering wheels before Toyota made my car, but that doesn’t detract from the value I find in having one.
• Widgets are a resource hog. True, but it’s 21° and partly cloudy at Kirkwood right now, and I know that by glancing to the right a little from where I’m typing.
• You should wait for SP1. Service packs are good, you’ll get no argument from me on that point. That said, all indications I’ve seen are that the updates in the service pack are mostly performance tweaks and trying to get a handle on some of the compatibility problems that have plagues the Vista release. I welcome the tweaks and have no compatibility issues of my own. Your mileage may vary.

Overall, I like Vista Home Premium so far. It’s going to take years before the new graphics engine is well and truly embraced by the software industry, but spending a little time as a relative early-adopter isn’t going to cause you many fits unless you insist on dragging your old hardware along with you, or you have the misfortune of being an accountant; most tax software doesn’t like to handle old forms.