News

April 2005

BEFSX41 - Upgrade hell: Like me, you certainly know that you need to regularly upgrade the firmware of your router; But you may not know how bad this can be.

My BEFSX41 is a small wonder, but it was still using v1.44.3 (version dating back in 2002!). I decided to upgrade to the latest revision from Linksys. It's only after 4 hours of pure hell and nightmare that I learned (Thanks to Google!) that the recent versions of the BEFSX41 firmware are simply uselessly unstable. My advice:

Don't use firmware v1.50.18 that is available on Linksys web site.
Only grab the upgrade software.
Instead, get the v1.45.3 from their FTP site.
After upgrade upgrade, force factory defaults parameters (You need to clean things after the upgrade).
Then, set the BEFSX41 with your own parameters.

This will probably let you avoid most of the instabilities I experienced (and I appear not to be alone). It seems most perceivable if you use a P2P application like I do (the reason I choose this very router, if you remember).

Opera v8 arrives: My prefered web browser (Opera) just upgraded to version 8. It brings a number of user Interface improvements, added security (including a better display of the exact security status of visited web sites), a waste basket for the window panes you close and - as always - excellent mouse movements for browser commands.

Multi-core CPU at Intel: Revolution or not? This monday April 18th, Intel lanches a new mutli-core CPU (several CPU cores inside a single CPU chip). Is it a major innovation? Hardly.

AMD has already been offering such a combination for a trimester and IBM as well as HP added this kind of option to their offering more than a year ago.

What's left then? Some news for sure, the launch is probably announcing the arrival of brand new Windows applications able to seriously use this kind of configuration (graphic editors are already powered, videogames are coming fast and Office will probably improve on its small capabilities here). 2005 will be the year of the mutli-core CPU.

Computers are all but jargon: At least, that's what a group of MIT students seems to have proven lately in getting an international conference (World Multi-Conference on Systemics, Cybernetics and Informatics (WMSCI)) to accept a couple of papers that were randomly generated and that contained no understandable information at all.

As you can imagine, they opened a subscription to be able to present their "work" at the conference. More than 150 donors offered more than 2500$.

Not to far from the 1996 Alan Sokal hoax that proved that social science was sometimes filled with more scientific mumbo-jumbo than meaning.

All about Area 51: In this Nevada location, UFO lovers (and ufologists) believe that one or more extra-terrestrial space ship crashed and that the American government is keeping an alien embassy where they get high technology from the little grey ones (like the microprocessor, the laser, or even the still-secret marvel of a cancer cure).

Thus, this American base, very secret, in the middle of the Nevada desert, is the center of an unusual attention. Thanks to Google maps, a man suceeded in knowing more (a little more, some satellite photos, well, something).

More details and some photos.
The Wikipedia article about Area 51.

Source: µ the INQUIRER

Time to upgrade your computer: The word of mouth in the analyst circles is that DRAM manufacturing capacity is currently too large for the demand. This could lead to a price drop in the coming weeks, when stocks start to pile up.

Sirenomelia.org: a (very specialized) web site coordinating a medical international study about the genetic origin of sirenomelia.

Overclocking Athlon 64: It has been quite a long time since my last news about overclocking. And for good reasons: It is becoming more and more difficult to do things right with the wealth of parameters to check. It's becoming black art. But, this paper offers a good description of the advantages/impacts of each and every little change you can make on an AMD Athlon 64 configuration. Urgent reading.

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April 2005

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