An announcement was made earlier today that the manuscript of the sixth (of a planned seven) books in the Harry Potter series, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, has been completed and that the book will be released worldwide on July 16th, 2005. (Desiree will be pleased.)

Despite his questionable social views, Orson Scott Card is still a damn good author and storyteller. As his non-fiction writing for the Commodore-themed magazines Compute! and Ahoy! suggest, he also has a deep interest in and knowledge of technology.

These virtues make him a very interesting and compelling choice for writing Ultimate Iron Man (as Comic Book Resources recently revealed) since Tony Stark is the Marvel Universe’s premiere technology-based superhero. But he’s also a bit of a cad, traditionally written as a flamboyant womanizer with a drinking problem. Given Card’s conservatism and his predilection for writing heroes who have unerring moral compasses, it’ll be interesting to see how the author’s work plays out on this title (currently only planned as a mini-series).

Well, it’s not often I get to disprove a statement made at Tom’s Hardware, so allow me to refer you to page 2 of the Linksys WRE54G review, where they say:

One other “feature” is that the Expander does not have an Ethernet port. This means that it can’t be used as a wireless bridge to a wired LAN and you must set it up from a wireless client.

Well, I just did it… and I can say without reservation that the proceeding statement about needing a wireless client to set it up is not at all true.

As a result of moving to a new house (which, as you may recall, Desiree and I did in October) our wireless network had to cover a lot more territory through a lot more interference. The repeater seemed like a sensible way to improve coverage, so we purchased a Linksys WRE54G to add some more ‘oompf’ to our Linksys WRT54G’s range.

Our home network topology is tailored to our needs; our primary gaming computers are wired directly into to the LAN, as are our 3 infrastructure servers (a topic for another time). This allows us to eliminate the latency inherent in wireless networks and go beyond the 54mbit/sec bandwidth limit of over-the-air 802.11G. [Believe me, when you’re poking your head around a corner in a tense LAN game of Raven Shield you’ll want the lower ping time, and if you’re streaming movies to multiple clients off of a fileserver, you’ll be happy for the bandwidth.] The upshot of this is that our only wireless clients are our Xbox, our Tivo, and Desiree’s Apple G4 Powerbook. None of those are going to be able to run the windows-only setup disk, so what are we to do?

How to configure a WRE54G with a wired client
(Note: this explanation will assume you know how to make IP address and subnet mask configuration changes to both your AP/router and your wired client. If you don’t, then ask a friend who does for help, or seek to learn more.)

1. Log in to your wireless access point/router from your wired client.
2. Disable WEP on your AP/router. If this scares you, then remember it’s only temporary. If you don’t have WEP configured on your WLAN, then do the world a favor and either start using it or unplug your WLAN from the Internet.
3. Change your AP/router’s subnet to the Linksys default - 192.168.1.0/24 - and give it an IP address in that range (if you’re not already configured to use it), then save your changes. Make note of your router’s settings before you change anything.
4. If you had to change your subnet to 192.168.1.0/24, then you will also have to change the IP configuration of your wired client. If you are configured to use DHCP, request a new IP address. If you are using a static address, then give yourself an address in the 192.168.1.0/24 range that isn’t the address of your router or 192.168.1.240. Make note of your client’s settings before you change anything.
5. At this point, both your wired client and your AP/router should be on the 192.168.1.0/24 subnet. Verify this by logging in to your AP/router’s administrative interface from your wired client.
6. Plug the repeater in at the location where it will reside.
7. Press the “auto-configuration” button on the repeater and hold it down until the link light starts blinking.
8. Wait 60 seconds, then go back to your wired client and point a web browser at the repeater’s default address, 192.168.1.240. (Log in using no user name and the password “admin”.)
9. If you weren’t using the Linksys default subnet before, change the repeater’s IP address to something on your preferred subnet and the default gateway to the default gateway on the preferred subnet. You will be temporarily unable to connect to the repeater from your browser after you do this.
10. If you changed your AP/router’s IP subnet in step 3, then change it back to its original settings.
11. If you changed your wired client’s IP address information in step 4, then change it back to its original settings also.
12. Now your AP/router, wired client, and repeater should all be in the same subnet. Verify this by logging in to the repeater at the IP address you assigned to it in step 9.

At this point, everything should be working fine - your repeater should be amplifying your wireless network’s signal. However, WEP is still disabled, so you’ll want to turn it on, starting with the repeater first.

13. From the repeater configuration screen, enter the security settings and use the same password and encryption type you plan to use on your AP/router. (If you were using WEP before, then use the same password unless you feel like reconfiguring all of your wireless clients.) Don’t forget to generate the keys and save the config. You will be temporarily unable to connect to the repeater from your browser after you do this.
14. Log in to your AP/router and configure it with the same encryption type and password. The keys you generate should match the keys generated on the repeater.
15. Verify connectivity from AP/router to repeater by logging in from the wired client, through the AP/router, and to the repeater. While you’re there, change the default password for goodness’ sake.

It worked for me, so hopefully it will work for others in this somewhat unusual situation.

Extrasonic now has the beginnings of its new CSS and index.php.

Many more changes are forthcoming - de-uglifying the comments page, an update of the old category/author icons (including gravatars!) etc. - but I figured it was done enough to post.

(Non-spam) comments welcome.

Here’s an interesting tidbit - some hosting companies (including Pair, Total Choice, and TextDrive) are turning off their users’ Moveable Type weblogs because the combination of Moveable Type + MT-Blacklist + comment spam is effectively causing a denial of service issue on shared hosts, consuming massive amounts of memory and jacking the IO wait up to the point where these shared resources are unusable by any customers.

Looks like we made the switch to WordPress just in time, especially with ColdForged’s anti-comment spam plugin recommendation.

Now if only I could get the new index.php and stylesheet done…

It’s been a long time since we’ve posted some humor, so here’s some more Craigslist comedy gold from a man who has a very special and intensely personal question for you, dear reader, now that he suspects his girlfriend is cheating on him.

No, I haven’t seen National Treasure, but if you browse our archives you know we have an interest in what some might call the archaeology of unusual histories.

A British archaeologist claims to have found definitive proof of John the Baptist’s existence, although his colleagues remain skeptical.

Grail hunters will be somewhat disappointed to learn that Bletchley Park, the codebreakers who cracked the Enigma code in WWII, have come to a conclusion that the encoded inscription on the Shepherd’s Monument is not a Templar message regarding the location of the Holy Grail, but instead a defiant statement from the Priory of Sion, a sect which did not believe in Jesus’ divine parentage.

If you’re interested in that sort of thing, then both articles are worth a quick read.

Quite frankly, this site is going to be ugly for a while.

The conversion to Wordpress was smooth. Except for some non UTF-8 characters in some old posts, the conversion of the entire 2+ years of Extrasonic on Moveable Type went very fast and very easily.

Desiree and I have a LOT of template and CSS work to do before we’re happy, so you may see some experimentation on the live site; please bear with us. Once we get the “look and feel” right (which is not likely to happen for a couple of weeks, given our work schedules) then we’ll focus on adding/coding/refining features. Wordpress has an amazing amount of flexibility, so I’ve got some ideas for some new stuff.

Thanks, and try to deal with the ugliness for now - sorry.

This site has been converted to Wordpress 1.2.1, temporarily using the GPL’ed “Human Condition” theme and all comments are now moderated until a less draconian approach can be implemented.

Oh, and comment spammers? Fuck you. No, seriously - fuck you.