Let me give you an example.  How many corporate workstation users deliberately leave their workstations on so that when system updates are pushed out overnight, they are already installed when they get to work the next day?  So, leaving my laptop on at work on while I am sleeping in bed (with it being set to hibernate) uses less electricity than the lamppost outside my door (with a 60 watt light bulb)—you know the one my homeowner’s association says I must have.  The laptop is putting my employer back less than 10 cents per day that I leave my laptop on outside of business hours. To the typical stressed out office worker, the 5 to 10 minutes it may take to boot up their workstation is worth much more than 10 cents, with carbon emissions a nascent thought. 

On a positive note, PC makers are using greener materials and I am all for that as long as it doesn’t affect my user experience in a negative way.  I mean, after all, we have been working hard to keep Moore’s Law going strong and Moore definitely isn’t helping on the power consumption front.  More transistors equate to higher performance and, with today’s semiconductor technology, more energy consumption.  Areas where performance has been increased without increasing energy consumption are in the use of mult-core processors. The same rules apply to the transistor counts in a core, but adding more cores improves the megaflops per watt consumed by a typical CPU.  While a little questionable in its reasoning, Wikipedia lists the MHz-to-watts  ([loosely]speed- to-power) ratios of all the main line consumer CPUs.  The wikipedia article demonstrates a point—if you note the Celeron line, typically used in mobiles, versus the Core 2 Duo processors, typically used in desktops, the speed to power ratio is much lower with the mobile CPUs.  Good for the green minded, bad for the performance minded.  

Some may be tempted to make the analogy between sports cars and the need for the extra power that typically doesn’t ever get used in commuter driving (so why would anyone want a sports car then?). Sports cars waist energy just idling at the stop light.  This analogy CANNOT be used with computer processors. Higher performing processors DO mean better application performance (assuming RAM and video are up to par).  An application user gets the opportunity to utilize the full power of the CPU much more so than a commuter with a tricked-out ‘vette.

Over time, I have learned from managers, coworkers, and through self-observation that I am really good at making end-to-end solutions work—especially in areas where “no man has gone before.”  Fringe system integration solutions seem to materialize in my mind with relative ease.  Being very knowledgeable of many different IT technologies and approaches to integrating technology, as it turns out, does fit a job title pretty nicely.  I find that I am well suited to being an Architect.  While being an expert in every facet of an IT project is not typically a requirement—being really knowledgeable in most of the areas is very useful.  As an example—you might not need to know the most efficient method for executing a CRC checksum on a binary blob, but you must know that a coder on the project needs to develop an efficient method.   A broad swathe of technological know-how, the ability to communicate well, and an innate ability to lead make the best IT  Architects., in my opinion at least.

IBM has a very nice description of what an IT Architect is:

In terms of position in the organization, the architect is the technical lead on the project and should have the authority to make technical decisions. The project manager, on the other hand, is more concerned with managing the project plan in terms of resources, schedule, and cost. Using the film industry as an analogy, the project manager is the producer (making sure things get done), whereas the architect is the director (making sure things get done correctly). As a result of their positions, the architect and project manager represent the public persona of the project and, as a team, are the main contact points as far as people outside the project are concerned. The architect, in particular, should be an advocate of the investment made in creating an architecture and the value it brings to the organization.

The architect is also involved in organizing the team around the architecture and should actively contribute to planning activities as a result, since dependencies in the architecture translate to the sequencing of tasks and therefore the skills required at particular points in time. On a related note, since the success of the architect is closely linked to the quality of the team, participation in interviewing new team members is also highly appropriate.

So, I am happy to announce this shift in my professional repertoire.  For the near-term, a life of Architecture is where I will be focussing my attention.  I hope to meet many more Architects that might be out there along the way.  SHOUT OUT!

Related: Characteristics of a software architect (http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/rational/library/mar06/eeles/)

Let’s, look a this.  How many species killing scenarios are there to choose from?  It’s not hard to find enough of them to fill a volume of encyclopedias.  We’ve got plagues, volcanoes, sunamis, asteroids, cosmic rays, etc., you name it.—we’ve got it.  For instance, there is the Andromeda and Milky Way galaxy collision—estimated contact: 2-5  billion years, plus or minus. There is a good chance that our sun won’t collide with any of Andromeda suns, but do you bet the species on that?  Maybe we don’t need to worry about galaxies colliding as the sun is going to burn out in 5 billion years anyways.  I am not so much talking about the calamities that might happen; for god sakes, I am talking about the ones we know are going to happen.

Let’s get closer to home now.  On February 1, 2019, a two kilometer wide asteroid (2002 NT7) might hit the earth. Is this the same as, it might rain today?  If there is a 1% chance of rain, my hair might get wet.  If the asteroid hits it might destroy a continent and drive the into earth to a deep ice age. Even with Yellowstone’s recent heightened activity—it seems that the people of the planet are blowing it off (no pun intended). Scientists know that the Yellowstone caldera blows up every 600,000 years or so, and we are estimated to be about 640,000 years into the next cycle.  There are various assumptions about the resulting aftermath of this eruption,  everything from 2/3 of North America becoming an ash strewn wasteland to the planet going into extreme cooling with little sunlight for growing food (i.e. global starvation).  Project managers—what are you doing to deal with this?

I think we know that the “important” people of the earth will be taken care of ,at least for a while, but what about the masses?  It seems to me that the governments of the earth are being a little irresponsible here!  We know that bad things are coming—not might be coming!  Nevertheless,  we get all discombobulated over oil prices and whether or not we have global warming.  Global warming over global destruction….hmmmmm.

So what are we doing to prepare?  I don’t know.  Maybe we should be looking into things like: 

• Living under the sea. We came from the sea anyways—we might need to return there.  The sea takes a long time to cool, even if the surface of the earth becomes a frozen wasteland—plus there are tons of geothermal vents in the ocean and food to be harvested.
• Living underground. Scientists belive that many mammal species survived living underground in past Asteroid hits that darkened the earth—maybe we could too.
• Build an orbiting, Battlestar Galactica type, armada above the earth.  Why not—we have made a lot of advances in harvesting food in hydroponics fams.  Orbits are fairly easy to sustain for decades if need be.  
• Become the aliens to other, life sustaining, planets that some think we are currently being visited by.  Who’s to say that by the time we crash into Andromeda that earthlings won’t look like the Greys already?

The bottom line is that the world needs to start paying it forward.  There will won’t be an available After Action Review on this one. Well, that’s it for my ranting. Seriously though—-irresponsible people!

The easiest ways to prevent an SQL injection attack are to use parameters or stored procedures.  With this approach a Web site’s form fields cannot be used to build an SQL command.  A stored procedure can run under a security context that is only allowed limited permissions.  In this way, if a stored procedure was compromised—it couldn’t do anything harmful.  

You will see the term “build an SQL statement” around when researching injection attacks.  Typically novice developers will do something like this when creating a data input form:

insert into logged_in_customer (first,  last, userid)

select  acct_first, acct_last, acct_userid

from customer_accounts

where username=”’ +  username.Text + ”’

The “building” part is in bold and occurs when developers use external data to create or complete an SQL query.  In this example, the where clause is built with a user entered value from a textbox as the criteria.  We would hope that this textbox is being validated for injection on both the client and server side, but lets assume it’s not. What if the user entered the following into the text box:

’ or 1=1 —

This seems pretty innocuous right? Well this simple example would cause every user to be entered into the “logged_in_customer” table.  Let’s break it down:

In username=”’ ,using two single quotes in the where clause creates an escape sequence for the char/varchar data type .  The last single quote terminates the SQL  text string so that we can add (inject) the username.Text.   The trailing set of single quotes follow the same rules.  Can you see what happens here when a bad user enters the first single quote into the textbox?  Yep, the first ‘ in ’ or 1=1 —    causes the sql string to be terminated giving complete control over the where clause. So, just with the first single quote, we effectively have username=” , or the username equals an empty value.  In itself, this wouldn’t cause any harm—most likely no user account would be returned.  The or gives us an alternative input value to accept in order for the query to be successful. The 1=1 is always a true statement, therefore the where is always successful and every user would be entered in the logged_in_customer table. In username.Text + ”’ , what do we do with the last two single quotes that are in our original query that are suppose to be escape characters for our desired single quote?  That is where the — comes into play.  In MS SQL Server, two single dashes designate a comment, in which case the database compiler ignores everything following the two dashes until a newline is encountered. Using the comment at the end of our SQL injection prevents the SQL error that would have been returned by the final single quote.   

My example is overly simplistic, but lets you would be amazed at the code that prestigious organizations unknowingly have deployed on their Web sited. Let’s look at possible horror story that could happen from this simple example.  What if a Web site used the logged_in_customer table to prevent more than one user session from being logged in at one time?  This would effectively cause a denial of service to any customer that attempted to log in.

Reading an e-book on a phone takes a steady hand and an abundance of patience.  Just when you think you’re reading like an Evelyn Wood speed reader, you find that you’ve clicked to advance the page 20 times, only to make a quarter of a page’s progress.  I don’t so much mind having to feverishly click the page forward button as I do a mobile reader application that makes me scroll over horizontally on each and every line of the book because it does not wrap at the visible screen margin. This pretty much makes me forfeit the attempt of reading the document or book. The last peeve I have over mobile readers is that nearly all of them use backlight TFT-LCD displays (if you’re lucky you might have something with a beautiful organic LED—OLED).  A TFT display does not do well in conditions where there is a lot of natural light.  To compensate for this, you have crank the backlight up all the way and leave it on just to be able to read the text without an eye strain born migraine.  Most backlights shut off after a certain amount of inactivity, so you have set the device to keep the light on for longer periods.  The backlight, of course, is one of the biggest battery charge buzz-killers. So, assuming that one might only use their mobile device to read with, as opposed to making phone calls etc.., you’d be lucky if the typical device would last an hour of continuous reading.

Now lets contrast the The PRS-700’s features against the typical mobile device with an ebook reader installed. First off, the PRS-700 does not make the user scroll horizontally when the documents don’t fit the visible margin while in the standard reading mode.  The word wrapping algorithm seems a little odd though, as it does newspaper style column wrapping (i.e. putting dashes at random points int the word at the point of the line feed) with using the default font size (small). The PRS-700 doesn’t seem to do image resizing while in standard reading mode.  This means, for PDF documents, that you will get all of the image, figure, or table text stacked up in weird configurations (i.e. 12 letter word getting spread down 4-3 letter wide columns).  In the case of data tables in a PDF document, they become unintelligible.  The, sort of, workarounds for this are to a) set the font size to small and get your reading glasses out so that you can get the microfiche-type version of the page as it looks in the original book, or b) use the zoom feature and go back to scrolling both vertically and horizontally to see the complete page as it did in the original ebook.  The only problem with the zoom mode is that goes out of zoom mode each time you turn a page. I might have offered the user the option to stay in zoom mode while changing pages. Fortunately, if you have to go-a-scrolling, the PRS-700 has a touch screen.

The PRS-700 touch screen isn’t going to be like the TV version of the iPhone, but it performs well enough to get the job done.   Before I go on, let me make this extra clear:  there is very limited use of touch screen dragging  to pan around the document (only in zoom mode).  The other touchscreen features are used mostly to click on screen, rendered buttons that perform various functions.  Highlighting text to make notes and/or bookmarks and using a couple of scrollbars are the only other places I have seen the use of dragging with the PRS-700 touchscreen and included stylus.  At that, text highlighting seemed clumsy to me and prone to not having the desired outcome.  The stylus is slight a misnomer too, as you will not be doing any free form markup to your documents. The stylus is simply a slightly more elegant version of your index finger. You’d have to have a severe fat-finger issue to need the stylus ( I am talking gorilla fingers here).

The most novel innovation that the PRS-700 utilizes is its e-ink Electronic Paper Display (EPD) screen—a truly revolutionary technology.  I will not go into details, but essentially the display flips a pigment to be either white or black. Once the pigment is flipped it utilizes zero energy to stay static. This means once a page is rendered on the reader it stays that way until the device forces it to change.  I am perplexed as to why the PRS-700 clears the page after an hour of inactivity, as this actually takes more energy than just leaving the page up.  The only thing I can figure is that there may be some sort of burn-in affect if the same image stays up for very long periods of time. Another possibility is that the touchscreen takes energy while waiting for something to touch it. The EPD allows the PRS-700 to undergo about 7500 page turns on a single charge (i.e. this does not include using the LED reading light, or using the processor intensive functions like text searches and zooming in and out).

I read a lot at night and find the low power LED reading light very useful. Now, this is not a backlight, because EPDs are more akin to actual paper, than an LCD display.  The reading light actually shines light on the display not through it like on an LCD (you can think of a LCD display like an overhead projector—where you have to shine light through the plastic to see the image on the wall). I have found I get about 4 hours of use on a charge using the LED reading light 100% of the time.  I haven’t killed the battery yet using it without the LED light—so, I’d say it would take days of reading to deplete a full charge if you are just reading (i.e. not using any processor intensive features). The EPD reads great in typical room lighting or with natural light—heck, it looks great reading outside on a bright day!  The screen resolution reminds me of the first black and white, hi-res Apple MacIntosh displays that came out in the ’80s.  The image quality amazed me on the EPD just for the simple fact that it doesn’t take any electricity to stay there, but yet I can change the page to something completely different.  I find that the resolution is great for reading and even detailed, greyscale images look fine.  On a side note—when I was reading my first book, I thought there was dust on my display, but found that there were several “pixels,” if you will; that were always stuck in white mode.  It hasn’t degraded the experience, but it looks like the manufacturing process (and/or quality control)  hasn’t been perfected yet on the EPD. 

The text search feature performs adequately for books that are under 250 pages or so, but I have found that any book larger than that takes far too long for my impatient tastes.  I have also found that searching books in the 500+ range have caused the device to lockup (or at least become unresponsive) in which case I had to reboot it.  The PRS-700 has a photo viewer—which makes perfect sense as this a digital image and text rendering device; however, I am less sold on the music player feature.  The primary reason for having an EPD display is for the low power consumption advantage.  Why then add a power hungry (in relation to the EPD) music player?  I don’t ever use this line but, “why rob Peter to pay Paul?”

Lastly, I am going to just whine a little bit.  Why on earth can’t Adobe and others make an ebook reader application that actually knows which page it’s on?  Invariably the page number on the reader is considerably different than the actual book page.  The PRS-700 has a page search feature, where you enter the page number you want to go to—but it’s never the same page as the Table of Contents or the Index—at least in PDF documents.  The PRS-700 also has a page scan tool in which you scroll horizontally to view different pages.  In the end, it takes more time than I’d like to navigate to specific areas in an ebook.   In my humble opinion, this is where an ebook reader reaches true “book-hood”— when it has all of the ease of use and utility of a paper book (or better, of course). The PRS-700 is the closest I have been to true “book-hood,” but it’s not quite there.

When it’s all said and done, I am glad that I made the plunge and paid the steep price for this piece of technology.  The pros definitely outweigh to cons to me, and that’s all that matters!

A great article on the promise of all electric vehicles over hybrids or alternatively fueled vehicles was written by Arnie Cooper (2008), in which he interviewed Elon Musk of Tesla Motors.  Tesla Motors has the only production, all-electric, full range (i.e. the range of a typical gas powered vehicle), and full speed (i.e. highway speed) automobile on the market. When Cooper asked, “Why not go hybrid?”, Musk replied:

We looked closely at developing a hybrid, but we decided it’s a red herring. If you stay purely electric or purely gasoline, you’re going to make a better car. As soon as you try to split the difference, you have something that’s neither fish nor fowl. A Prius is a weak gasoline car with a little bit of electric charge. And once you’ve used up the electric charge, you have an underpowered gasoline engine or a weak electric car. (Cooper, 2008)

Another argument that is often heard regarding all electric vehicles is that the cost of electricity is more than that of gasoline—per mile traveled.  Musk did the math on a 250 mile, all electric, trip in the Tesla and found that with California’s electricity rates (special rate for electric vehicles), the trip would only cost $5 (Cooper, 2008). I would argue that more investment needs to be put into alternative methods that power the electrical grid at a lower cost—followed by a push and get people into all electrical vehicles (instead of worrying about electricity prices right now).

Now on to the EEStor patent—the Electrical Energy Storage Unit , otherwise known as the EESU (Weir, R. D., & C. W. Nelson). The promise of this patent is truly revolutionary.  The foremost solution that this patent provides is the promise of a  low cost end product.  According to the patent (Weir, R. D., & C. W. Nelson) this is achieved by essentially using ceramic, aluminum, and plastic—all ultra low cost materials compared to the rare earth elements used in conventional batteries and fuel cells.  According to the Advanced Materials Website, the barium titanate (ceramic powder) can be purchased for as little as  $39.50/kg in bulk 50kg quantities (“Barium,” n.d.). The Polyethylene Terephthalate (plastic) goes for about $300/ton in the U.S. commodities market (“Polyethylene,” n.d.). Lastly, as of this writing, aluminum was trading for $1065/ton (“TheFinancials,” n.d.).  The EESU layers can even utilize a low cost screen printing method (Weir, R. D., & C. W. Nelson). This is all cheap stuff!  Mufson (2008), of the Washington Post , writes of the batteries currently being used, “Automobile experts estimate that the battery in a plug-in vehicle could add at least $8,000 to the cost of a car, maybe considerably more.” In contrast, the EESU is estimated to cost $2,100 as manufacturing ramps up (Hibbard, 2005). 

On existing electric cars, the ratio of “(battery weight) / (the weight of all other parts) ” has been very high, and this significantly affects the range of the vehicles.  The EESU only weighs 282 pounds, in comparison to Telsa’s 900 pound ESS (Toomre, 2007).  Another exciting feature is that, with a high capacity electrical connection, the EESU can be completely charged in 3-6 minutes (Weir, R. D., & C. W. Nelson). On the safety side, unlike Lithium Ion battery cells, the EESU does not have the risk of exploding when being charged or impacted (i.e. in an automobile accident).  We have all heard the Lithium Ion horror stories where someone’s cell phone or laptop catches on fire—burning white-hot.   One last feature that speaks to this pinnacle of technology innovation is its purported durability.  The most common and least expensive battery technology out today for vehicles (i.e. the lead-acid battery) has a lifetime of around 500-700 charge cycles (this is from fully dead to fully charged). An unsubstantiated claim from the Clean Break Web site cites a reliable source as saying, “…the EEStor technology has been tested up to a million cycles with no material degradation” (“What’s In Store,” 2008).

So, we have the plug-in Chevy volt hybrid that is widely expected to be from $35,000 to $40,000 (not available yet).  Next up there is the Tesla Roadster (fully electric and in production) at around $109,000. Last, but definitely not least, is the CityZenn (fully electric), based on the EEStor EESU, which is expected to be $30,000 and released in the fall of 2009 (Hutchinson, 2008).  The CityZenn’s top seed will be 78 Mph and will have a range of 248 miles (Hutchinson, 2008).

In addition to the tremendous promise the EEStor product provides the automobile industry, the patent creators suggest several other areas where the EESU technology would be well suited, such as: 

• Electrical storage for power generation plants supporting the power grid
• “Constant voltage” and “power averaging” storage solution for solar cells and wind power generators (Weir, R. D., & C. W. Nelson).
• Safe power packs for any consumer electronic devices and tools (note that the patent claims that the EESU has a higher power density than Lithium Ion—today’s predominant rechargeable storage technology—this is a good thing!).

(Weir, R. D., & C. W. Nelson).

References

Barium Titanate (Barium Titanium Oxide, BaTiO3) powder. (n.d.). In Inframat Advanced Materials . Retrieved January 04, 2009, from http://www.advancedmaterials.us/5622-ON4.htm

Cooper, A. (2008, December 12). Charging Ahead. Popular Science . Retrieved January 04, 2009, from http://www.popsci.com/cars/article/2008-12/charging-ahead#

Hibbard, J. (2005, September 3). Kleiner Perkins’ Latest Energy Investment. In BusinessWeek - Business News, Stock Market & Financial Advice . Retrieved January 05, 2009, from http://www.businessweek.com/the_thread/dealflow/archives/2005/09/kleiner_perkins_1.html

Hutchinson, A. (2009, January 1). ZENN and the Art of the Electric Car. Toronto Life , p. 41.

Mufson, S. (2008, November 25). The Car of the Future — but at What Cost?; Hybrid Vehicles Are Popular, but Making Them Profitable Is a Challenge. Washington Post , p. A01.

Polyethylene Terephthalate (PET) Prices and Pricing Information. (n.d.). Retrieved January 04, 2009, from http://www.icis.com/v2/chemicals/9076425/polyethylene-terephthalate/pricing.html

TheFinancials.com Commodity Market Reports. (n.d.). In Stock, Commodity, Futures, Forex, Mortgage/Real-Estate and Treasury . Retrieved January 04, 2009, from http://www.thefinancials.com/commodities/GotoMarketReport.html?id=MarketBaseMetals_CMMetals.html

Weir, R. D., & Nelson, C. W. (2008). U.S. Patent No. 7,466,536 . Washington, DC: U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.

What’s in store for EEStor? (2006, January 19). In Clean Break . Retrieved January 05, 2009, from http://www.cleanbreak.ca/2006/01/19/whats-in-store-for-eestor-2/

Technically, what will be doing is creating a bridge that is referred to as a  client bridge/AP (Access Point), because we will join our wireless routers under the same network segment.  Standard bridging joins two different networks using different subnets. An example of a real life scenarios where you might use a client bridge is as follows:

You have a wireless home network in the basement of your home, but you’d like to have access to your home network in an upstairs office.  Your two office PCs do not have wireless LAN adaptors—only standard RJ45 ethernet connectors.  The solution is to place a wireless router (in our case a WRT310N) in the office re-flash its memory, configure, and connect the PCs to the router via ethernet cables.

The software package we will be flashing the router with was created by NewMedia-NET GmbH and is located in the download section of the DD-WRT Web site. DD-WRT is one of the most predominant 3rd party router software makers and provides it for free under a GPL license.  On top of the added bridging features, the DD-WRT router software gives nearly full access to all of the router’s (more specifically, the Broadcom chip) services and monitoring capabilities. For instance, after the load you will be able to monitor the router load (1/5/15 minute), monitor throughput, utilize RADIUS, view routing errors, view tx/rx errors and export rflow data. 

Now down to business, here are the steps to configure your WRT310N as a winless client bridge/AP:

IMPORTANT:  This is a “do-it-at-your-own-risk” project.  While none of these steps will damage any physical hardware, you may loose settings, lose network connectivity, or “brick” your router (i.e. lock it up so that it will not route or allow an administrative login).  If the flash process does cause the router to be “bricked” you can restart the process all over again. Follow the recovery procedures at the DD-WRT Web site.

NOTE: you should not have to change ANY settings on your existing wireless router.  In this configuration, the WRT310N is a NEW, additional, router to your network. The routers should have compatible 802.11a/b/g/n protocols as well. In the case of the WRT310N, it is a Wireless-N router, so it should be backwards compatible with older protocols such as 802.11/b/g.

1—Make sure your PC is plugged into any of the non-WAN (Internet) ports of the WRT310N router

2—Log into your router (the factory default URL to the router is http://192.168.1.1, if you have changed the IP then enter this instead)

NOTE—If you are re-purposing the router get any important settings you might need (i.e. IP address, wireless security settings etc..)

3—Factory reset the router in the (menu->Administration->Factory Defaults->Restore All Settings)

NOTE—The default user and password of: admin / admin will now be set on the router

4—Hard Boot the Router (Depress reset button down in back for 10 seconds and pull the power plug without releasing the reset button)

5—Download the mini version (dd-wrt.v24_mini_wrt310n.bin ) of the DD-WRT software for the WRT310N router (the mini version is scaled down for the easiest/safest installation)

6—Flash the WRT310N router with the DD-WRT binary you just downloaded (menu->Administration->Firmware Upgrade)

7—After a successful flash, factory reset the router in the (menu->Administration->Factory Defaults->Restore All Settings)

8—Hard Boot the Router (Depress reset button down in back for 10 seconds and pull the power plug without releasing the reset button)

9—-Log into your router (the default URL to the router is http://192.168.1.1)

Note:  You will now notice a new look to the router software, as you are running DD-WRT

10—Change the login name and password—write it down!

11—If all is going well so far, then we can upgrade the DD-WRT from the mini version to the standard version. Download the standard version (dd-wrt.v24_std_generic.bin) and follow steps 6-10 using the standard version binary of DD-WRT.

12—Now it’s time to configure the new router as a client bridge.  Log into the router and click on the “setup” tab.

13—Under setup->Local IP Address,  I suggest setting the router to your existing IP plus one (assuming your existing is set to the factory default of 192.168.1.1 —set the the new router to 192.168.1.2).  It must remain within the same subnet as your primary router. 

14—Assuming you use the values in step 13, your subnet would be 255.255.255.0

15—Both the “Gateway” and “LocalDNS” will be the same as your primary router (following with step 13 and 14 both IPs would be: 192.168.1.1)

16—Click Save

17—Click Apply

18—You will now have to log into the router with the new IP you assigned. (following with steps 13-15, the URL would be: http://192.168.1.2)

19—Go to the Wireless tab and set the “Wireless Mode” field to “Client Bridge”

20—Set the “Wireless Network Name (SSID)” to exactly the same SSID that your primary router has

21—Set “Network Configuration” to “bridged”

22—As this is a layer 2 bridge, you must set your wireless security settings to be exactly the same as your primary router (for example if you are using WPA2 Personal—set the mode, key, and algorithm to be the same on both routers 

23—Click the status->wireless->”site survey” button.  This will show all of the wireless networks within range.  Find your primary router and click the associated “join” button.

24—Click Save

25—Click Apply

26—For good measure, lets power-cycle the primary router (unplug and wait 10 seconds, plug back in)

27—Power-cycle the WRT310N bridge/router (unplug and wait 10 seconds, plug back in)

That’s it, now plug in your wired ethernet devices to the WRT310N and you should now be connected to your home network.

*** NOTE: if any of the router flashing procedures fail and you cannot log back into the router, follow the flash recovery procedure detailed on the DD-WRT Web site. ***

Regarding the topic of search, Gates’ (2008) states “… [Microsoft] is certainly an underdog, but we have amazing people.”  Perhaps Gates is speaking of himself when giving accolades to his former staff.  Later in the interview Rose says, ” … they [naysayers] would look at missing search and not doing search and giving Google the opportunity as what? A mistake?”, to which Bill replies, “Oh, sure. That`s a mistake.” Mistakes sure, but Charlie Rose quotes Warren Buffet’s thoughts on Bill Gates’ business acumen, “If Bill had started a hot dog stand, he would have become the hot dog king of the world” (Gates, 2008).  This all becomes relevant when Gates notes that he is only working on key Microsoft projects and search is one of the primary ones.

It could be argued that Gates’ search work is revolving around the on and off rumored and actual negotiations to buy Yahoo’s search business, but what if Bill is doing some hard computer science work here? After all, Bill changed his title to “Chief Architect” at one time, which indicates his interest in the technical aspects of the underlying operating system functions within Windows.  With all of Gates’ attention on one primary topic (i.e. search), I think he could do astounding things—perhaps even more than when he was juggling multiple projects working 9-5 at Microsoft. If I were Google, at the least, I would have nervous optimism about Microsoft’s future role as a search contender.  Historically, Microsoft plays a mean catch-up game. 

References

Gates, B. (2008, December 22). Interview with Bill Gates [Interview with C. Rose]. In Charlie Rose Show. New York, NY: PBS.