I just spent the last couple of hours discovering that my U-Verse gateway’s DNS server (serving the internal network) decided, for fun, to persist old IP addresses for some of my computers. The end result of this was that, while their external/NATted access was fine, local network services that were reliant on DNS would fail …
Author Archives: Erik Novales
My Reflections on Apple
I’m pretty sure this will be one of a million “stories about Apple” that will be going up tonight, prompted by the death today of one of its founders, Steve Jobs. Like many of my peers, the Apple IIe was one of the first computers I ever used, and one that I spent a huge …
Home Wireless Networking…
Our new apartment has a nice layout, but with regards to home wi-fi, there are a few key differences from our old place: There are many more neighbors here who are also using wireless networks. They’re also closer to us than in our old place. The construction of the building itself may be contributing to …
Memory Card Bugs (and a note about static analysis)
I was watching John Carmack’s QuakeCon 2011 keynote, and he mentioned that Rage was currently in the stage where they are creating cert builds, and just fixing bugs like (paraphrased) “getting a multiplayer invite and pulling your memory card out.” Memory card bugs are one of those things that tend to be a big annoyance …
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A Musing on Sirius Radio
On Sirius, why is Lithium (the ’90s rock channel) so terrible in comparison to the excellent First Wave channel? I listen to both regularly, and I’m still hearing unusual or rarely-heard tracks on First Wave. It’s great. On the other hand, on Lithium, I’m guaranteed to hear a steady diet of the same Soundgarden, Alice …
Fallout: New Vegas has gone gold
Here’s the official announcement on the Bethesda blog, along with pictures of an awesome Fallout: New Vegas themed cake that one of the designers at Obsidian got for his birthday. I pitched in for a couple of months prior to certification to help get it ready for ship. I hope everyone enjoys playing it once …
The Kindle is really picky about USB cables…
I decided to try setting up Calibre on my machine to manage my e-books, and rather than use the e-mail sync functionality with my Kindle, I figured I would just sync it via USB. I attached it through another micro-USB cable that I happened to have attached to my computer, but I had weird issues …
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Windows 7 Mobile Device Center not recognizing my phone over USB
I had some issues setting up my increasingly old and decrepit phone with my new machine – I installed the Windows Mobile Device Center, but it refused to recognize my phone when connected by USB. I seemed to be having some other issues at the time, and had an aborted attempt to install the proper …
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Movie Update
Iron Man 2 is not a very good movie. Terminator: Salvation is completely awful – it’s an unintended parody, and completely out of character with the earlier movies in terms of plot and pacing. Moon, however, is excellent, and well worth watching.
A Gross Overgeneralization
From David Chisnall: If you find yourself optimizing your code, then it means that the author of your compiler has failed. This is just very, very untrue. Even if you strike algorithmic optimization from the picture, code optimization is still a very important and useful skill to have no matter what sort of programming you’re …