My Red Ryder B.B. Gun for this year is an M-AUDIO MicroTrack 24/96.

These guys have been talking quite a bit about the Nokia 770, which Christian should find under his Christmas tree if he's lucky enough to find one (their online store warns that current orders cannot be fulfilled until February). I admit the 770 looks like a fun development platform, but the official first item on my Christmas wish list is the M-AUDIO MicroTrack 24/96. For $100 more than a 60GB iPod, I could have an affordable mobile audio solution that can also record hi-fi audio (see here for not affordable). The included 64MB CompactFlash card is only enough to record short meetings and lectures. But with a 2GB (or larger) MicroDrive, it's perfect for sneaking into clubs to tape live shows in lossless 24-bit/96kHz glory. And a hell of a lot easier to deal with than DAT. It also comes bundled with Audacity, a free software sample editor that's available for Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux. Too cool!

OK OK, the 770 is on the list now, too.

Blue Brick Server

Every once in awhile my router’s port forwarding rules would become invalid when my desktop box got a new DHCP lease and its IP address changed. Unless I enabled remote HTTP administration, there was no easy way to update the rules for the new IP address unless I was at home to access the webmin console over the LAN. I wanted to configure my router – a venerable Linksys WRT54G 1.0 – to bind static IPs to MAC addresses so the rules would stay valid day after day.

With the testimonies of several of my local LUG members to spur me into action, yesterday I intalled OpenWrt – a free, Linux 2.4-based firmware for the WRT54G (and many other models as well). The router was previously running Linksys’ latest official firmware, so I couldn’t use the recommended method of transferring over TFTP without jumping through some hoops. Instead, I successfully flashed the router by simply using the webmin console just as I would with an official firmware. Most of the settings were saved into NVRAM and migrated automatically. The only thing left to do was to create some port forwarding rules for iptables (which did not migrate, but were easy to create) and test network access on each computer in the house. Strangely enough, the only computer that complained was a laptop running Windows XP.

See more progress on: install OpenWrt on my Linksys WRT54G

South Koreans go absolutely apeshit for Microsoft Visual Studio 2005!

Microsoft has a new pop music video to draw South Korean developers to Windows. The ad itself is quite horrifying, but as a side effect I am more motivated to advocate adoption of GNU/Linux and free development platforms in my homeland. Since South Korea has one of the largest broadband per capita in the world and a superior education system, it has incredible potential for developers that I don't think is being fully tapped. So dear lazyweb, I ask you to create a proper Korean pop music video to promote Mono/C#. A ballad please, I wish to be swooned.

On another, less corny and melodramatic note, I've had it in mind to regain fluency speaking the language but I simply don't use it enough daily. So I started contributing to the Rosetta Translation Project and despite the difficulties in translating tech terminology (e.g. initializing GStreamer source/sink objects), it seems like a great way to practice.

webstandards.zealots += 1

After convincing a fellow aspiring webdev friend to learn the value of content-style-logic separation and web standards adherence and also hooking him up with better tools for Windows, work on The Commission's official website is progressing much more smoothly. Now I can simply update the live version by SSH'ing into the web server and issuing an 'svn update' command.