Stray Photons: Recent Posts
This week's star is the mongoose
Another entry in the "cute carnivore" series, we have the mongoose. Some mongooses are fairly smart and can learn simple tricks. They can be kept as pets to control vermin. (Your landlord will love you.) Mongooses giggle when mating. (I haven't tried that myself but I suspect it wouldn't go over so well.) One of their coolest features is that they are immune to snake neurotoxins because they have acetylcholine receptors! I guess that's why mongooses are sometimes used to hunt or fight venomous snakes.
So, sure enough, a VMWare Server virtual machine wasn't "real time" enough to act as the router and firewall. RTP audio quality was quite poor, with noticeable pops and silence gaps because of the high jitter. I moved all the gateway and packet processing stuff over to real hardware, and everythin ... [Read more]
I suspected the day was going to suck when I got up Friday morning and noticed that our Internet connection didn't work. This was quickly confirmed when I wandered down to check on the servers and found the firewall lying in a gooey puddle of Pentium soup. Well, not really, but it was pretty close ... [Read more]
I left the basement door open yesterday for about half an hour while working on the house (because I got tired of repeatedly opening it to go in and out). Later on, working away in the basement, I saw a little brown furball zip across the floor beside me and hide under the oil tank. A chipmunk was ... [Read more]
So, yeah, I decided to add a bit of a blog. Of course, being the type that I am, I had to write the software for said blog first. (Good excuse to play with Python anyway.) It's pretty rudimentary right now, but I'll add more features as time permits and whimsy strikes. Why, you ask? With all the n ... [Read more]