Author Archives: Marc

Bought a TiVo for my parents

Posted on by
Reply

My parents’ birthday (yes, that’s right – parents’ – they both have the same birthday) is this week and I wanted to get them something different this year. I went ahead and bought them a TiVo along with a 6 month gift subscription. I’m a little worried because I’ve told them about my TiVos before (my wife and I have two) and they’ve never expressed very much interest in them, but I have a feeling that they’re just having trouble envisioning it. Maybe I’m a zealot, but I just can’t imagine anyone who owns only a VCR getting a TiVo and not finding it to be utterly superior to the VCR. Hopefully, they’ll love it and will be able to get it setup without too many long “tech support” calls to yours truly.

This was also an opportune time to sign up for the TiVo Rewards program.

accretive design => headaches

Posted on by
Reply

Somebody summed up my thoughts succintly today about a particular piece of software that I had been playing with: “accretive design => headaches”. He also pointed out that “accretive design” is an oxymoron, which I also think is true.

From Webster’s Revised Unabridged Dictionary (1913) [web1913]:

Accretive Ac*cre”tive, a.
Relating to accretion; increasing, or adding to, by growth.
–Glanvill.

Simple, elegant designs tend to evolve gracefully, whereas bad designs tend to lead to hack upon hack. Of course, hindsight is 20/20.

I hate sites that break the Back button

Posted on by
Reply

One of the most irritating things a web site can do is to break the expected behavior of the Back button in my browser. So by using inappropriate caching settings, a site can make it so that the Back button refetches content, which makes it slower and introduces the possibility that the fetch could fail. Even worse is sites that do little redirect tricks so that using Back doesn’t work at all and you just get redirected right back. You can of course defeat this by going back 2 instead of one, but every time that I have to do this I grit my teeth. Some sites have their own Back navigation links – something which I don’t really understand or use. The Back button is a standard part of the browser – why not use that? The user always knows where the Back button is and it doesn’t take away page real estate from your content.

These are both part of #1 of Jakob Nielsen’s top ten new mistakes of web design

Windows XP and WiFi problem solved

Posted on by
1

After mucking around a bit with my wireless settings (in efforts to get WPA working with WDS with Sveasoft Alchemy with my new 5 port switch), I found my wireless malfunctioning in a most bizarre and highly annoying way. The symptoms were:

  1. Wireless connection dropping roughly every 5 minutes
  2. Completely backwards information coming from Windows and the little wireless tray icon
    1. When Windows said that one of my preferred networks was found, this in fact meant that the connection was dropped. Time for a right-click and “Repair”…
    2. After doing the Repair, Windows says that it was not successful and that the wireless is not connected. This, however, is a lie! The wireless works, well for about 5 minutes or so, until the cycle repeats…

After a few false starts trying to fix this problem by downgrading Alchemy, messing with the router settings, and uninstalling a dozen programs, I happened upon the real solution: Disable IEEE 802.1x authentication in Windows’ wireless properties for my access point. In case you don’t know where to find this, maybe this screenshot will help:

802.1x screenshot

It turns out that this is recommended in various forums, if you do a search.

Finally got both TiVos networked

Posted on by
Reply

It took a while, but both of my TiVos are now on my home network. The first problem was that origianlly I had my WAP54G in client mode, but that only supports one wired client. So I had to install Sveasoft’s Alchemy firmware on my WRT54G so that I could run it in WDS mode while running my WAP54g in Wireless Bridge mode. Then I tried to use an old Linksys BEFSR41 router so that I could hook up multiple devices to the single port WAP54G. This did not work though, because the BEFSR41 has a NAT firewall which I could not turn off – so that rendered the TiVos inaccessible.

I set out to buy a cheap, simple hub, but it’s actually pretty hard to find hubs these days and none of the ones I found were good deals. I ended up with a nice little 5 port Netgear FS605 switch, which is better than a hub anyway and was only $23 at Newegg, plus it came with a $10 rebate.

Netgear FS605 5-Port 10/100 Fast Ethernet Switch

End result of all of this: I can telnet to both TiVos and I can use TiVoWebPlus on both of them.