Category: Rant

Can I just say right now how much I hate…

…the Airport Utility (AU) that comes with the Airport Express (AE) base station.

First annoyance is that the damn AE reboots every damn time you change the slightest little parameter. You want to add a new printer? Reboot. Add Windows networking to the shared disk drives? Reboot.

Second annoyance is that the router has to have the .1 address. Too bad I was using 192.168.1.1 for my Linux box, and 192.168.1.254 for the router before. So I had to renumber every reference to my Linux box everywhere on the LAN.

So I got around that crap. The shared printers and disk were working great. But then Vicki noticed that the TiVos weren’t connecting to the network any more. Oh yeah, new SSID. I guess I’d better reconfigure them. That’s when the real fun began.

Real fun number 1: TiVo wouldn’t connect to the new network, because the new network uses WPA instead of WEP. Ok, fine, I thought, I’d convert the AE to WEP.

Real fun number 2: AU will only accept WEP passwords as 13 alphanumeric characters. The usual Apple way of entering a hex string WEP password, by putting a $ at the front, doesn’t work.

Real fun number 3: After rebooting, the Airport Utility says the AE is using WEP, but everything that attempts to connect to it (my laptop and the Tivo) says that it’s still using WPA.

Real fun number 4: Every couple of reboots, the AU says it can’t connect to the AE, and you have to exit it and re-enter.

Real fun number 5: I tried turning off the security entirely. After yet another reboot, the AE refuses to come back up. I power cycled it, and it has a continuously flashing yellow light on the front, which normally indicates an error of some sort. AU confirms that the “error” is the lack of security. That’s fucking annoying.

Real fun number 6: With security turned off, the TiVo says that it can’t find a DHCP server. Since it had no trouble finding the DHCP server before, I assume that’s the AE’s fault.

At this point, I said “fuck it, this sucks”, and switched off the AE and put the Linksys back. The AE is going to go off to the Genius Bar to see if there is some secret way to get it to do WEP as well as a router that costs 1/5th as much does.

If that doesn’t work, I have a plan B: put the AE in pass through mode, and put it, the printers and the disk in the library. That might even improve the reception in the kitchen.

New glasses

I got new glasses on Tuesday. I had reading glasses before, but I hardly ever wore them because until recently I didn’t need them unless the light wasn’t very bright. There were only two times I really felt the need – when I was reading in bed, and when I was trying to plug something into the back of a computer. Plus they gave me horrible eye strain if I looked through them at distant things. My eye doctor recommended that I get those no-line multi-focus lenses, because then I could keep them on all the time and they’d be there when I needed them, plus there would be one part of the lens that was good for up close stuff and another part that would be good for computer screens.

Ok, two days on, here are my impressions:

  1. They do fulfil the promise of something I could keep on all the time, so they’re handy when I need them.
  2. There are some things that don’t fit the multi-focal glasses paradigm of “close things are down low, far things are up high” – the one I notice most is the wing mirror on my car.
  3. I’ve got to learn to ignore them, because I think I stare when I’m looking through them. A few hours and my eyes get really dry.

Also, I was walking into work yesterday and I thought something was wrong with my iPod – there was a large dark area on the screen. A little while later, sitting at my desk I looked and was releived to see it was no longer there. And then l saw it again on the way out to the parking lot. That’s when I realized that the clip-on sunglasses that came with the glasses are polarized. D’oh!

Hating re-routes, part II

I woke up this morning at was shocked to find it was raining. This was a total surprise to me, as I thought the forecast was for more sun. This was a huge disappointment, because I’d decided that I’d prevent New York controllers from giving me a half hour ground hold or re-routing me all over hell’s half acre by flying VFR.

Fortunately, while it was raining all over most of southern and eastern New York and New Jersey, it was all layered stratus clouds so no thunderstorms. So it would be IFR, but flyable IFR. That’s good.
Continue reading “Hating re-routes, part II”

LazyWeb: Slow DNS lookups on MacBookPro?

Vicki complains that sometimes she can’t ssh into my Linux box (foo.xcski.com) from her MacBookPro. This morning she said it was happening again, and when I looked on her system “host” and “dig” couldn’t get an address for it, while at the exact same time, my Powerbook got the right address just about instantaneously. A few minutes of poking around and not doing much, it suddenly started getting results again, and she was able to ssh in.

We have exactly the same DNS settings – two DNS servers, 192.168.1.1 is the local one that knows how to find *.xcski.com servers, and 192.168.1.254 is the DNS server on the wireless router which probably just redirects to the ISPs DNS servers.

I’ve never had any problems with DNS lookups on my Powerbook. So why is she getting these problems?

Friday’s lesson: Don’t make your weather decision without looking at the sky

I nearly didn’t make the flight up to Toronto for the Pilot Blogger weekend. There wasn’t anything on the radar, and the TAF (Terminal Aerodrome Forecasts) were talking about a 40 percent probability of isolated thunderstorms, which is pretty normal for this time of the year. But at decision time, the METAR (current conditions) at Rochester were:

KROC 131554Z 25011G17KT 10SM BKN037TCU BKN070 22/12 A2993 RMK AO2 SLP132 TCU SE CB DSNT N T02110111

Now, I’m not great at reading all the “RMK” (remark) part of the METAR, and that’s where the scary stuff was. All I know is that “TCU” means “Towering Cumulus” and “CB” means “thunderstorms”. And I went to the decoded report on DUATs, and it said that the “TCU”s were in all quadrants. So I thought I’d be flying IFR, dealing with the extreme turbulence of TCUs while out over the lake, and thought that wasn’t a good situation to be in. So I told people I’d be driving instead.

And then I walked outside. One odd thing about Rochester is that the airport is south of the I490 highway, and there is frequently a real difference in the lake-affected weather up north of I490 and the mainland-affected weather south of it. So I walked outside and looked up and north to see scattered clouds and bright sunshine, and then looked south towards to airport to see some of the TCUs the forecast was talking about, but mostly to the south of the airport. And suddenly realized that if I were to depart VFR, I could dodge the TCUs until I was in the lake-effected weather, and have no problems following the lakeshore around to Toronto.

I haven’t done a VFR flight into Canada in a while, so I had to dust off those old memories. But I managed to get all the appropriate paperwork all done, and didn’t cause any international incidents. (Not so on the flight home – as I type this I realize I forgot to close my flight plan, so I’m calling right now. Can I just mention for the record that I wish US controllers would open and close flight plans the way Canadian ones do?)

When I took off, as soon as I got turned over to departure control, there was a gigantic rain shaft about 5 miles in front of me, and I was about to tell him I was going to turn north because of it when he pointed it out to me and gave me a vector. But 5 miles later I was at 3,000 feet in sunshine, mostly smooth air, and I could see across the lake.

The lakeshore is a lovely flight, and Toronto gives me flight following around, but requires me to stay out of their airspace, which means descending into mild turbulence and staying lower than I’d really like to. But the flight was fun and I’m really glad I got to fly.