As promised, here’s what I’ve been interested in as far as techonology goes lately.

Linksys WRT54G wireless router is turning out to be a geek’s wet wireless dream. There’s an open source firmware update that lets people use every imaginable feature of the Broadcom chip. You can do WDS (mesh networking), boost the antennae power, set your own routing tables. It’s just nuts. Unfortunately, you have to shell out $20 if you really want to get some help doing it. Not too high a price.

Fink is cool, but can be hella annoying. I’m trying to install gnucash on my little iBook since I don’t have a recent copy of Quicken. This would probably be a nice piece of software to slap a web UI on and start bringing in some bucks. I’ll play with it and see if it is worth looking into.

My problem with it has been the damn xfree86 libraries. It keeps wanting to compile them, but the Apple x11 install is conflicting or something. It turns out it just wants the X11 SDK from Apple. I found it secretly hidden on the XCode Tools CD. After installing it, the gnucash compile moved forward. Now I’m just waiting for it to finally finish.

Since not everybody wants to download the whole XCode CD just for a 5 MB file, I’m putting that package available here. It works for me, so if it doesn’t work for you, there’s a 614 MB download you can get from Apple that also has it. This fixed my problems with needing a system-xfree86-dev as a placeholder package. Without it, you only see system-xfree86 and system-xfree86-shlibs. Without it, I had so many problems compiling anything that remotely used X11 libs. Incidentally, this is taken from the XCode Tools 1.2 CD.

Also, I really like Visual Studio .Net. It’s the best IDE in the world. Everyone else just tries to do what it does. Except for refactoring, other tools have that down better. But hell, VB is not exactly a refactoring delight. I love that the IDE lets you use so many damn languages. Plus the debugger is actually useful and doesn’t require a lot of crazy crap to make it work right. I had some nightmares with gdb I don’t want to talk about. overall, I think it really increases productivity and at the end of the day, you use what will help you push out lines faster and of better quality.

Good night all.