milliAmp

When I was 9, my parents, my brother and I took a trip around the world to visit Mum’s relatives, Dad’s friends and other family friends they had built up over the years. One place I’ve never been to though, is Australia.

I think I might have an opportunity to “jump the ditch” as they say and have a holiday over in Australia next year. A couple of our friends are heading over there for the Soundwave ’09 Festival in February/March next year. Aimee and I are hoping we’ll be able to save enough money to go too but it does mean that I’ll probably need to negotiate time off from my new job only 4 months after starting which may or may not be a problem. The concert is only for one day, depending on which city we go to but we’ll want to stay at least a couple of days.

The bands performing at Soundwave include some of my favourites like Madina Lake, The Red Jumpsuit Apparatus, Funeral for a Friend, New Found Glory and hellogoodbye as well as some major headliners like Nine Inch Nails, Alice in Chains and Bloodhound Gang.

As of Tuesday, 28th October 2008, I’ll be moving jobs from Evos Group Ltd. to Enlighten Designs Ltd..

I’ll be straight into C# ASP .NET programming which is all new to me. They have a ton of work on at the moment so they’re hoping I can hit the ground running and I hope so too. It should be lots of fun.

I just had to write about this because it frustrates me a lot every time I run into this. It is these new-fangled heat-sealed packages a lot of electronic gadgets are coming in now. You can’t get them open with practically destroying the entire packaging. I don’t want to go and find a pair of scissors or a knife to get into my new gadgets. I also don’t want to slip with said cutting device and cut a cable or the manual. Some headphones I bought a few months ago had this heat-sealed packages and the edges were dangerously close to where the cable ran inside the packet.

I am a box-hoarder. I keep boxes for my gadgets for at least a year after I buy them, in case it breaks in the first couple of weeks, in case I want to sell it; I can sell it in the original packaging and if it wasn’t bought locally, some retailers request that you send it back in the original packaging. So, I keep boxes. It frustrates me that the packaging for these devices has to be destroyed to get into the thing.

It means that if it doesn’t work for the purpose I need it to and want to return it to the shop two days later, they can’t put it back on the shelf for full price because the whole thing it ripped apart and it means I can’t offer it to someone to buy later in the original packaging (well I guess I could but with it being in pieces, it distracts from the point of doing that).

Does anyone else have a problem with this nasty packaging or is it just me?

Last Thursday afternoon, a close friend of mine gave me a call to ask whether a discounted price he had seen for an iPod Touch was a good deal or not. He was pretty keen on getting an iPod Touch even though the iPhone 2.0 is released in a couple of weeks but he seemed pretty set and doesn’t have a need for another cellphone as his work supplies one for his use.

They don’t currently have a wireless network at their house and seeing as the iPod Touch has wi-fi capability we ended up discussing that I was interesting in selling my current Airport Express Wireless G base-station to upgrade my infrastructure to Wireless-N.

The main reason I wanted to upgrade was actually to have an Airport Extreme Base Station which would allow me to share both printers and also a couple of hard-drives over the wireless. The Airport Express only supports one printer and no hard-drives so I have had to switch USB cables around to print to the other printer in the past.

So, knowing that he was keen for that deal, I went out and purchased a new Airport Extreme Base Stations with Wireless-N and Gigabit ethernet. I also picked up a new Wireless-N capable Airport Express so that I could once again stream music to our downstairs speakers.

My next mission was obviously to map out how I wanted to set up the network and the devices. I love setting up network infrastructure, I don’t purport to say I’m any good at it at all but I find it a hell of a lot of fun.

I plan to sprinkle this blog post with diagrams of the old set-up and the new set-up but my laptop is currently at the shop getting its iSight looked at and I’m using a user-account on Aimee‘s laptop which doesn’t have anything that I can easily draw diagrams in. For now I’ll add a textual description.

My network consisted of:

• An ADSL Modem/Router for internet connectivity
• A LinkSys VOIP to POTS adapter, for use with our Xnet Fusion VOIP account
• An Apple Mac Mini, connected in the lounge for entertainment purposes
• Two Apple MacBook Pro Laptops
• An Apple Airport Express, currently in use only as a base station since we moved to our new house

Then I added:

• An Apple Airport Extreme Base Station
• A new Apple Airport Express

And I’ve packed up the old Airport Express.

I wanted to add to the network

• My Laser printer
• My inkjet Printer
• My 2-disk RAID enclosure
• Possibly a couple more hard-drives for laptop back-up purposes.

There are a couple of restrictions this placed on the network. For internal network QoS, the Linksys VOIP Adapter needs to be placed between the router and the network so that voice traffic gets injected right at the router. This also means that our cordless phone and corded phone need to be connected within a few meters of that adapter.

The RAID enclosure isn’t network capable so it needs to be connected  with a meter or so of the Airport Extreme Base Station. As do the printers.

Also, the only two locations in the entire house with a phone plug are the kitchen/dining area and the master bedroom.

So I went ahead and picked out a possible solution. It all works pretty well.

I went the whole hog and set up my Wireless-N network on the 5GHz frequency using wide-channels to get maximum possible throughput. We don’t have any 802.11b or g devices in the house (or so I thought) and I doubt anyone in our close proximity has a 5GHz network set up so all was well.

I have the router in the master bedroom and an ethernet cable running from that into our work room. In there is the Base Station, the hard-drives, the printers and the VOIP adapter attached to the cordless phone base.

Downstairs I have the Airport Express and the Mac Mini. As I eluded to above, it turns out that the Mac Mini isn’t Wireless-N capable as I thought it was, it only supports 802.11b and 802.11g so it ended up being connected via gigabit to the new Airport Express as they’re right next to each other anyway. The Express is currently connected to the Base Station using WDS.

I had a fun time setting up the printers. I decided to stretch USB to the limits and see how far away I could keep the printers from the base station. It turns out it is 7 meters keeping to the skirting board to the first printer and another 3 meters to the second where they are placed quite conveniently now. There is a maximum length of 5 meters between devices  so I pulled out an old USB Active Extension cable, then plugged in a  2 meters of USB extension, followed by a USB hub and then plugged the first printer in using a short cable and used a 3 meter cable to reach to the other printer.

I thought I had all my numbers worked out but for some reason, the base stations wasn’t recognising either of the printers! I played around a little and found that the base station didn’t like the active extension cable plugged into it, but it didn’t mind having a hub first and then the active extension so I went down that road. Turns out I would have had to add that initial hub anyway to plug in the hard drives next to the base station so all is well.

I wasn’t particularly pleased with the file transfer throughput so I ended up playing around with WDS, wide-channels, different frequencies and even forcing the base station down to wireless-g to see if I could find out what was happening.

I’m just finishing up testing the network performance using the various settings which I’ll post about at a later stage.

The iSight camera on my MacBook Pro hasn’t been working for a number of months but since I rely on the laptop so much (and have had Uni stuff to use it for) I haven’t wanted to be without it for more than a few hours. Now that my final exam is over for the semester, I’ve had the chance to take it in and get it looked at while it is still under warranty.

I don’t use the camera much at all but it is rather annoying with it broken if I do want to use it.

I’m using Aimee‘s laptop for the moment, while she is at work so it isn’t so frustrating to not have my laptop, it just lacks a few of the programs I use and all my email.