Author: Corey

Consumer networking equipment quality has taken a nosedive in the last 18 to 24 months. Having been working very closely with one consumer networking equipment manufacturer over the last six months, I can honestly say that I don't think I will ever buy a consumer-grade piece of networking gear ever again.

The problems here are two fold and quite obvious; hardware design/quality and software quality. In the hardware realm, quality problems are not a new idea. Part qualification standards are, as far as I can see, non-existent. For example, the KR1 Mobile Router I've been working on had a CMOS battery in it. The battery was reportedly there to keep the time on the router while it was unplugged as this is a mobile product. In testing, I showed that the battery was completely non-functional. As it turns out, it was never designed to operate on a battery so they took it off. Why was the battery placed on the PCB in the first place?

Moreover, software quality and standards have really degraded. In my observation, it is now standard practice to write code, compile it, ensure that the product actually boots up, and ship it. There is no black box testing by a quality organization and no verification that all features are functional. The product is released to the public and then the support complaints roll in. Based on these customer reported issues, firmware fixes are rolled in and a new upgrade build is spun and put up on support sites for users to upgrade themselves. In effect, the customer is the tester. This is quite cost effective because the company doesn't need to pay testers or spend any extra time before getting the product to market. People almost must have some form of networking equipment in this day and age and they continue to purchase it. So why does this matter? I'm glad you asked.

My D-Link DI-524 is a victim of this downward trend in quality. It is a basic router with 802.11g WiFi support. It suffers from a problem where it likes to reboot randomly when you chunk too much data through it. And by too much, I mean connecting to IRC or and FTP server. It is highly frustrating to be cruising along and suddenly completely drop your Ethernet connection to the router. I found a hacked version of the DI-624 firmware (same hardware in both units, just a different driver for the WiFi chipset that does 108mbps) and loaded it. It exhibited the same type of issues but in different ways. Rolling back to older firmware lessens the frequency of the problems.

These problems are not generic to D-Link. They also affect the latest version of one of Linksys' best selling product lines: the WRT54G. Version five is an utterly horrible piece of junk and a simple Google search will enlighten you to all of the varied issues. Netgear suffers as well but to somewhat of a lesser degree. It seems that they started with a more solid code base which allows them to get the basics right without breaking DHCP or something

"So Mackie, what's your great plan for solving this problem?" A simple answer: m0n0wall. m0n0wall is a barebones edition of FreeBSD that contains a web server with PHP parser that runs most basic network functions. It will do the standard DHCP, DNS, and other routing duties but will also provide traffic shaping and reporting services. All of this is configured via a single XML file and the web-based GUI. It is compatible with all hardware that FreeBSD supports so you can use nearly anything with it. All of this for free, and it runs on an 8MB Compact Flash card.

It is designed to work on embedded PC platforms but can also work on any old PII you have laying around, provided it has at least 64MB of RAM. No hard drive or optical drive is required provided you acquire a CF to IDE adapter. It will run on any x86 architecture, including MiniITX, MicroATX, and ATX systems. I've ordered all the parts for mine and they should be arriving in the next week. I'll be providing update posts to go through system setup and configuration soon. Stay tuned.

Many a moment have been spent by various contributors of this website, namely the great Grendel himself, in fixing errors committed by those who are entirely too silly to learn basic markup tags for links.

The scary thing is that most of you gallant offenders try to compensate for this lack of not being dumb by instituting some veiled attempt at forum delimiting code. No more, says I! Herein will you find the key to all that you desire, or at least something that makes us smack our heads in frustration a tad less.

HOW TO CREATE A LINK USING HTML

Item One: The Anchor Tag

The anchor tag is the root basis for creating a link. It says to the browser, "O hay, you remember where I am, being an anchor and all, and you go check out this page that I'm linking." It is because of this that you can click back after clicking a link and the browser knows what page to display.

Item Two: The Hypertext REFerence

The hypertext reference, or href, says to the browser, "Why hello there! This is where we'll be traveling today!" In short, it is the page to which the link points. Combining these two ideas is some markup that looks like the following:

<a href="yourlinkhere.html">

Note: The purpose for the angle brackets, < and >, is to delimit the markup from plain text. They let the browser know what is HTML and what is not. The equal sign and the quotation marks are common ways to identify and specify a variable. In our case, where the link is going.

Item Three: Naming And Closing The Anchor

So, after you've opened the anchor, provided a hypertext reference, and specified where you want the link to go, you need to name the link and close the anchor tag. The link name is what will be displayed by the browser when it reads the link markup. This value is specified between the opening and closing anchor tags. To close the anchor tag, simply issue another anchor tag but with a forward slash in front, like thus:

<a href="yourlinkhere.html">Your Link</a>

More goodies on HTML can be found at HTML Goodies.

I was recently contemplating the lack of automatic flushing toilets in only the places where the need to be able to not touch anything is of paramount importance. Or, at least something that had, at a bare minimum, some basis in reality. Upon failing that task rather spectacularly, I reflected upon recent developments in the proliferation of not-from-concentrate orange juice.

Growing up in our house, orange juice was not unlike a fine wine; it was to be celebrated and revered. One would dare not drink it lightly and there would certainly be no consuming of this fine nectar in mass quantities. It comes as no surprise to many that oddities of this sort were hardly odd.

In recent times, orange juice manufacturers seem to have gotten all giddy with themselves. In conjunction with the health craze that has swept the nation and changed a cause into an industry, orange juice has changed from something that both tastes good and is good for you to something that still tastes good and is good for you but is more expensive.

Not-from-concentrate is the catchphrase of the day. And, for some faux added personal value, a certain brand added the word, "Premium." Premium, indeed. I have no facts to back up this generalization, but I believe it is a general belief held by the public at large that something from a, "Mom & Pop" organization has more value than something that is produced by a mega-corporation and are thus willing to pay more for it. Thus is the case with some orange juice companies. They market their product as a local family business so that an unsuspecting and unquestioning public will pay more for their product under the guise that they're getting some sort of value from it.

Now we have things that are infused with calcium, extra vitamins, various minerals otherwise used to build things, and my personal favorite, low acid. How on earth can you justify making an orange juice without citric acid? That makes it orange water. It's like asking for tires without rubber or Olean without the anal leakage.

The thing that really gets me about all of that is that they charge anywhere from 50 cents to two dollars more per carton. I'm as much of a free market capitalist as the next American pig dog, but this isn't profit though business; this is blind rape of a society so focused on its health that it has become chief among civilized nations for its lack thereof.

So, why does any of this matter? What is the point of bringing it up when this idea is not new and will certainly be repeated in the future? I think it has something to do with the realization that Five Alive is not really orange juice but a mixture of things that, had I known at the time, I certainly would've refrained from ingesting.

Editor's Note: This entry was originally posted on DownToZero.Org.

So it seems that Southern California is a hotbed of activity for new product trials. The FritoLay company (In MSG We Trust) has replaced one of my favorite snack chips off all time with a haughty substitute that surely does not merit the hallowed name of Funyuns.

Funyuns with Wasabi. Mildly amusing Bud Light commercials aside, I have nothing against Wasabi as a thing in its own right. I do, however, take great issue with the violation of mixing this flavor with Funyuns. You see, Funyuns have a great flavor in and of themselves. They didn't need any help!

I found myself searching through the grocery store shelves a couple of weeks ago in an attempt to find a normal bag of Funyuns with which to enjoy while eating sammiches at various intervals throughout that coming week. I found one lone bag, stuffed way in the back, surrounded by these his traitorous brethren. There was much rejoicing.

Today, after my twice weekly walk that only happened once, I decided that it would be nice to stop by a local Stop-N-Rob 7-11 and acquire a, "Big Grab" bag of Funyuns to have with my sammich for lunch. To my horror, this store carried nothing but Funyuns with Wasabi. So I, being the highly adventurous fellow that I am (stop laughing) decided to purchase some because, after all, how bad could it be?

As if falling asleep at my computer desk last night wasn't punishment enough, I had to go off and not give this situation the proper consideration that it required. I opened the bag to a blast of fairly putrid air. However, the chips themselves looked fine. I could discern no major difference. At least until I tasted one.

My first reaction was one of spiked interest; they tasted exactly like they smelled. That is, the inside of a toddler diaper that has been filled to capacity. Much like those Olean chips that failed, this has to be made of something that was not meant for human consumption.

So my question is this: Who came up with this pinnacle of great ideas and why have they not been flogged yet? This stuff is horrible and I want my regular Funyuns back quick, fast, and in a hurry, please. My shouldn't-be-eating-chips-but-does-because-they-go-so-darn-well-with-sammiches body thanks you.

Editor's Note: This entry was originally posted on DownToZero.Org.

Sometimes there are things in life that just make you feel better about yourself, even with your shingles and nasty case of spontaneous lactation. This is one of them.

Grendel sez: This has nothing to do with Mackie's post, but here's a neat Japanese game. The point is to create one explosion, and see how many balls will explode along with it. (avg score is 30)