Peter Cetera was AWESOME!

The wife and I took in a Peter Cetera concert at The Fred in Peachtree City, GA on Saturday night. What a show! Peter was absolutely fantastic! We had front row seats (just behind the section of tables that front the stage), so the view and sound were both amazing. My only regret is that I don't own some sort of recording device that would have allowed me to secretly record the show....Yes! It was that good!

Maybe next time :-)

Dell laptop sound issues....IDT High Definition Audio

A friend of mine brought me her computer to fix. She had recently contracted a few viruses and/or spyware intrusions, and the morons that she took it to fix it ended up losing all of her data (except for her music) and reinstalling the OS (Windows XP MCE). However, now the sound doesn't work (I would have thought they would have made sure the thing was working before giving it back, but like I said, they are morons). The laptop is Dell Inspiron E1505. When you bring up the Device Manager, you see a "!" next to IDT High Definition Audio Codec. I found this document which explains that we simply need to install the SigmaTel drivers from the Dell site (I had already tried the Creative Labs drivers, but they didn't work). So I downloaded the SigmaTel drivers, uninstalled the current IDT drivers (right click, Uninstall), rebooted, ran the downloaded driver file, and all is fine now.

I personally don't buy Dell (for reasons which are more than obvious to those who know me), but my brother has a Dell. I've already yelled at him about it....

Firefox 3.5 has a memory leak....

I'm now running Firefox 3.5 on my Windows 7 64-bit RC1 (7100) release. Last night I had iconified Firefox to the taskbar, with only a single tab open (my home page, which is nothing more than file on my system with a list of favorite sites), and when I tried to open it this morning, it would not open. This is the 2nd time this has happened since my 3.5 upgrade last week, so I brought up the Task Manager and found that Firefox indeed has a memory leak. This single instance of Firefox had consumed over 1.2Gb of memory. Not only could I not bring up the old window, I could also not launch a new instance of Firefox.

I was able to kill Firefox with the task manager, but this is truly disappointing behavior from such a long-running product as Firefox.

I have monitored it throughout the day so far, and my current instance with 4 tabs open has grown to nearly 132Mb of memory. I will continue to monitor and report back here, but will also check for a bug report on mozilla's site.

Easy as 1..2..3...WRT54G wireless router now working as an access point

Well, that was much easier than I thought. It took just a couple of minutes to get my old WRT54G Linksys wireless router up and running as an access point, thereby allowing me to disable the somewhat unreliable wireless access through my AT&T RG. Here's how I did it:

1. I disabled wireless on the RG
2. I plugged my WRT54G (port 1) into a free port on my Linksys Workgroup Switch.
3. Since my WRT54G was already set up as 192.168.1.1, I didn't have to modify that, but I did have to disabled DHCP on the Basic Setup screen.
3. The "Internet Connection Type" was set to "Automatic Configuration - DHCP", so I left it there (later I actually tried setting it to "Disabled", and that broke the wireless connections, so I put it back).
4. Since this router had been set up prior with all the wireless security and features, I didn't have to monkey around with any more settings.

It just works! Hopefully my son won't have wireless disconnects during his marathon WoW sessions now. The only other tidbit of data is that I'm running firmware v4.71.1 Hpyerwrt 2.1b1 + Thibor15c [May 12 2006]. I installed that some time ago for my torrent activity, and see no reason to change.

Linksys WRT54G router as an access point

Well, the wireless on my AT&T U-verse RG (Residential Gateway) has flaked out a few times lately, and I don't recall nearly that many issues with my old, reliable Linksys WRT54G, so I'm gonna attempt to utilize the Linksys router as an Access Point, thereby allowing me to disable the wireless on the RG. Hopefully it'll work. I found a guide here, and some suggestions here as well. It doesn't sound too hard, and since the kids are away and Mandy is sleeping off a headache, I'm gonna give it a shot.

I upgraded my iPhone to the .... new iPhone 3G S

I was a good little boy and stuck with my first gen iPhone 2G from day 1, 2 years ago. On launch day of the 3G S though, I lucked out when my local AT&T store had a few 32Gb models still in stock. It's black...who cares! I put it in a case anyway. They also really pushed screen protectors, which made me think that Apple had maybe degraded the quality of the screen since the original model. After 2 years, my original iPhone has exactly ZERO scratches on it. It's in an Incase leather sleeve, and I usually carry it in a pocket by itself (no keys!). I checked, but I could not, however, find any reference that Apple had moved away from the cz (cubic zirconia) screen from the gen 1 phone. I did buy a pack of screen protectors, and they are damn near impossible to install. It's so flippin' hard to get it lined up, that by the time you do finally get it lined up correctly, there's now dust and junk on the screen, which makes it impossible to get all the bubbles out. What a pain. So far, discussions on the Apple forums seem to indicate that the screens are the same, so I should be safe w/o the protector. I hope so!

Is my AT&T U-verse RG flaking out on the wireless end?

My son has reported that his gaming will occasionally hang for 20-30 seconds, which is long enough for the WOW server to boot him out. He said this never happened when we had the Linksys router and has only started since the switch to AT&T U-verse from Comcast. He is on the 2nd floor, which is 2 floors above the RG/router. His signal strength is excellent, so it's very likely a product of the wireless fuctionality of the Residential Gateway (RG). He is the only heavy user of the wireless network (I have several devices, but he gives it the biggest workout...BY FAR). In any case, my old Linksys router is just sitting in a box, so I found this site that explains how to use a Linksys WRT54G as an access point instead of a router. I changed the channel the RG wireless is using to see if that helps, but if the hangs continue, I will put the Linksys back into service, utilizing my WRT54G as an access point (and disable wireless on the RG).