Lewies Blog

I was having some troubles assigning a second IP address to one of my computers. What I had left out was that all computers were behind a firewall. The cable modem assigns IP addresses based on your MAC address. Since it only saw one MAC address representing everyone, it didn’t have an opportunity to give out the other IP.

To solve this problem, I went out and purchased a hub. I hate to think of all that unnecessary traffic being broadcast everywhere. Hubs are stupid things. If I were in a room full of 100 people, and wanted to send a message to just one person, I would approach a hub and it would broadcast the message to every person in the room. Switches on the other hand are a bit smarter. They remember people. They would take your message and hand deliver it to the recipient. Switches are also expensive. The hub was thirty bucks.

So I’m driving home thinking of how to set up the network. I have cables that can only reach so far. It then strikes me. Rather then connect my own computer directly to the hub, I can do the same with my wife’s. She has some firewall software that is better then what I got. Then I come to the point where I just want to slap my head. I already have a hub that I can swap with my router.

I got everything setup in no time at all and confirmed against the What is my IP? site with different computers to see that the addresses were as I had in mind. Tomorrow I get to go back to Wal-mart and return a hub still sealed in its original packaging.

Since my wife and I have been having problems when connecting to Second Life at the same time, I went ahead and ordered a second IP Address from my cable company, Comcast. It costs $6.95 extra per month. To keep my budget within reason, I called up my cell phone company and asked them to change my phone plan. So after moving money around in the budget, it turns out that I’ll have about eighteen dollars more per month.

Anyhow the extra IP address was made available to me immediately - or so I was told. Rite now I’m just confused as to how to set one of my computers up to use the extra IP address. I have a Linksys Router (BEFW11S4 V2/V3) and a Terayon cable modem (TJ715x).

I discovered today that the cable modem has its own service located at http://192.168.100.1. This is interesting because I’ve seen this IP address before. I think our computers used to have its address in there network settings when we were troubleshooting our connection problems in the past. I always assumed that we were somehow connecting to a neighbors wireless DHCP hub.

A page went on to give information about many types of cable modems. This modem also has some diagnostic information at http://192.168.100.1/diagnostics_page.html. It has a password on the page. Chances are, if you know how to access the page, you probably know that the password is “icu4at!”.

Problem is, I went in here searching for something telling me how many computers are allowed to connect to the modem. I hear that the cable company needs to set my CPE parameter, and that it can only be changed by Tier 3 reps. I don’t know what I’m doing, and I’m not quite certain if I’m getting anywhere either.

My brother and I headed on over to my dad’s place. We had some debates when crossing one of the bridges on his driveway. We kicked some built up snow to the side and crossed the river under it instead. Just as we arrived, three deer jumped across in front of us.

Dad has been building a new house since June. He has the foundation built up and is starting to work on the roof. We came up to visit and help him out. On Saturday night, he and my brother started boasting how powerful there cordless drills were. They put the two ends together and my brothers started to smoke. I tried to remind them that Grand mom told us boys to behave when we called her earlier on the phone.

On Sunday, we went to work. I am afraid of heights as soon as I get a few feet off the ground. Rather then work on the roof, I ran boards for the pearling. I also measured and cut them to size with a skill saw. My feet had gotten cold and wet with all of the snow. There was about seven inches of snow on the top floor of the house.

We would take breaks after each quarter of the roof was done. It took us the whole day to get the job done. My dad had an airgun that would nail the boards together in one shot. We were almost done with only a few boards left to cut. Our blade dulled up when my dad had run it through a nail. He was trimming some of the previous boards that were originally placed to keep the roof trusses together. We got another skill saw but the blade on it wasn’t meant for cutting through oak. We decided to call it a day.

In the end, we didn’t get any of the sheet metal up on the roof. This was the main goal of the weekend and the reason we needed drills. He has a box full of screws with rubber washers to prevent rain from getting into the attic. I’m a little concerned how he is going to get those sheets of metal up on the roof, but he always finds a way to get the job done.

I woke up early on Friday and saw that I had some money in the bank. I upgraded both mine and my wife’s second life accounts. Now that we are paying money, we get 500 L$ per week rather then 50 L$. We also have to option to buy up to 512 meters of land without any monthly taxes.

I went ahead and purchased a plot of land in Dagger (38, 185) with part of the 1000 L$ that I got for upgrading. I first tried out a few of the free house kits that I found around the game, but nothing really caught my eye. I went back to sleep. After work, I tried building a giant shoe that I could live in.

It’s a process that takes a long time. I can’t cut objects from others, or merge them into each other. The best that I can do is link one object to another as a group of objects. Every item in the game is built entirely of primitive objects.

After getting the basic work done, I discovered that I was limited to using 117 objects on my parcel. I had about 90 objects already and I didn’t even have furniture or any knickknacks just yet. I changed my individual steps into a twisted hollow cylinder that worked out as a ramp. The shoe slowly morphed into a 2 story castle with roof access.

Rite now I have 30 objects for the castle. I’m still playing around with details. The castle lacks windows and partitions between rooms. Hopefully I can get it looking really great and sell the plans to other second life players.

For lunch I got to see my old boss. Or was he my boss’s boss. Then he was my co-worker for a while. Now he’s a manager again, but somewhere else within the company. Anyhow things are doing good with him and another friend that I hadn’t seen in a while.

My manager and I had lunch with them at a Thai restaurant. We got lost on the way, but we found the place quick enough. I didn’t know what I was ordering so I made a bold move and choose things that didn’t have any English words at all. I got a nice soup with chicken and mushrooms. It was spicy but not hot. I also got a plate of … stuff. It was good too but I’m still unsure of what I ate.

Later today was another Christmas party at work. Yesterday the building management people held a party in the lobby for all of the tenants. Today my company had its own party.

The 10th floor isn’t as mysterious as it was during last years Christmas party. One thing that I noticed rite away is that everyone appears to be middle aged or higher. I felt so young just walking around up there.

Much of the same selection that was at yesterdays party was there today. I joked with a co-worker that it must have been left overs. The food was pretty good. We had few people catering to us. There was fruit, crackers, meat on a stick, lots of plates of cakes, brownies, cookies chopped up in little pieces in different parts of the office. My favorite snack is the chocolate covered strawberries and mini eclairs.

I went to the back and choose to have a bottle of Heineken. I had a choice between a few types of wine and champagne. I have no clue when it comes to that kind of stuff. All I know is beer - and the beer of choice is Heineken. I didn’t have a place to set my drink so I gulped it down pretty quick so I could start eating my food.

I didn’t get too light headed. I stayed a few hours after work and left four hours after the party just to be safe. I had some work that I really needed to get done anyway.

MTU stands for Maximum Transmission Unit. Information flows over the internet to us in small packages. Rather then receiving an entire file (such as an image) all at once, it is split up into smaller pieces and sent to us. MTU defines how large those pieces can be.

The size of a packet of data also includes the header information that comes with it. Smaller packets will transmit more headers along with the data.

For an ethernet connection (a standard network card) the value can range from 68 to 1500. The default value is repported differently accross the internet. Some say 1500, 1480, or other values. These high values seems to cause problems. Changing the value to 1492 may help ressolve some problems (or 1400 if you are using VPN).

Also make sure that your router and all PC’s on your network are setup to the same values.

I’ll be tweaking a few things here and there until I can ressolve my crashing issues.

Oddly enough, the MTU Ping Test gave me max results at 1472. Adding 28 for the MTU header size, that brings me rite up to 1500. Now I’m really confused.

C:\> ping www.google.com -f -l 1472

My wife and I went out for a night on the town. Most of it was spent dancing in Transylvania in front of Sweet Oblivion. She is something special.

Of course, we always have problems with our clients crashing when ever we play at the same time. I’m puzzled as to what we can do about it. I’ve been debating if getting a second IP address would help solve the problem. It could be that some packets are getting confused since we are both behind a firewall using a DHCP server.

Anyhow, it’s time for me to sleep and for her to take over the night. Sweet dreams.

I’ve started building more things in Second Life. I started to look at the graphic template files that they provide. The face template caught my attention and I started to go to work at it.

I took a few pictures of my face and the sides. I loaded them up and found that it was difficult to map everything to the templates provided by stretching the photos in different ways. It was late and I went to sleep. Today I started looking around and found some morphing software. The only one that I’ve tried out so far is Morpheus.

This program is simple. Just drag dots onto the first picture, and then line them up on the second. I found some settings that let me keep the original image and hide the other one. I’m left with a very distorted version of the original image. That’s good news because that is what I want. The program is only $30. I don’t know what the difference is with the trial version just yet.

Hopefully I’ll be able to complete my face soon enough and swoon my wife in Second Life.

I’m still alive and made pancakes. That’s the news of the day.

In the game of Second Life, I started looking around some shops to find a nice top hat. I found one that had a few, but the objects were very simple. I figured that I would try making one myself. It took about an hour to build it. It is interesting to use the interface that they offer.

You build objects with primitives. There are spheres, cubes, tubes, prisms, boxes, torus’, and rings. I created a hollow top hat using 5 primitives. The inside is white and the outside is black with a purple band around it. It turned out OK. After making the object, it took a great deal of time positioning it just rite on my character too. It’s hard to position the entire object and stretch it if it is too small to begin with.

During my education at the Art Institute of Pittsburgh, I took some 3D modeling and animation classes in the computer labs. This hat would have taken just 1 object to make. I would make a shape by lofting a t-like pattern around a circle. I would have gotten it made with much less faces, vertexes and sides. I could always upload a texture to mimic the purple band, but it would cost me 10 Lira to do that.

I guess today we aren’t as worried. we are no longer limited to just 4 MB of ram on the high-end machines, rendering is quick, and bandwidth is very large as well. I couldn’t imagine a game of this size like this before.

If I wanted to, I could probably go around selling this hat to other players in the game. It is just so simple that I decided to go around and leave free copies at some of the junk yards and bazaars for the new players to grab.