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More and more college campuses are getting WiFi across the entire campus, or at least the majority of the buildings. This is great news for students, who can now access dynamic content easier than ever. What if you don't understand a term the professor just used? Google it in the blink of an eye, right from your laptop. So why not have this in high schools?

I'm not asking my district to get Internet2, which is pretty much the standard for colleges since they have to serve so many people. My school owns a custom laptop card rigged up with a wireless router. Why can't we leave this plugged in, and have it sit at one central point in the building? Normally they only break it out for conferences and meetings, and the occasional teacher who knows it exists and wants to use it in class (although there aren't enough laptops for every student).

There's an easy answer to this question: content control. The school wants to make sure they have complete totalitarian control over what we access when we're on school grounds. I could name ten ways off the top of my head that a smart, enterprising student could take advantage of using his own laptop to access any Internet content he wanted at school. Which unfortunately (and they know this), includes content they don't want him to access. I've read a lot recently about college instructors killing WiFi access in their lecture halls and classrooms during exams, etc. to prevent cheating.

Now there's talk of laptops being banned in some college classrooms altogether.

This article, written by an educator who has had to deal with his students browsing the web during his lectures, makes a very good point. He comes to the conclusion that teachers will just have to deal with it.

The student in me says "Hell, yes" to his response. The wanna-be-IT-manager in me says "Try me."

As of now, laptops are permitted in classrooms at my school, so long as the user isn't distracting class or jacking into the school network. And the core group of us who have all brought laptops or bring laptops daily have been in just about every place in the school we could think of, and no surrounding houses have open WiFi signals. So getting around logistical roadblocks is proving to be difficult for those of us who would be able to bypass restrictions in order to get what we wanted. But then again, part of me says that it's a good thing. We honestly shouldn't be surfing the 'net unrestricted during class. I'm torn. Decide for yourself.
Article [via Geeks are Sexy]

AMAZING season finale of 24 tonight. For the first time, the actual physical conflict is resolved in episode 23, with the political aftermath in episode 24. I have to say, this has been truly an amazing season. We saw sides of characters we've never seen before. Aaron Pierce, the honest and down-to-earth Secret Service agent, was seen at his darkest hour, being beaten by the men under his commnad. Not only that, but he actualy MADE A MOVE ON THE FIRST LADY. Oh, and Bill Buchanan smiled TRULY for the first time ever in the series, when Karen asked him for a rain check on their breakfast date.

I had a really strong feeling the Chinese would come back into play, despite assurances from Joe at 24 the Podcast that they would not return for this season. So this is the strongly rumored cliffhanger ending, eh? Not bad, but what the heck happened to the Wise Men? Graham and the others... are they just going to fade away, only to return at a Nina-esque moment 2 seasons from now? Anyway, I'm getting ahead of myself. I can't wait until January for a new day.

Kept it on Fox News for a few minutes following the finale, only to get a huge smack in the face by school board officials in district 128 in Vernon Hills (here in Illinois). They have just unanimously voted to put provisions about use of MySpace and online blogs in the school activitiy code. Don't mistake me, MySpace is awful and is NOT teaching kids to network properly, but this school district is WAY overstepping its bounds. They have decided to begin monitoring MySpace for the stupid things kids have posted there, and then of course, kick them off their respective school activities. Not that I'm encouraging kids to do stupid things, but DON'T POST IT ON THE INTERNET. I learned that the hard way, believe me... the Internet is a global tool. I'm not even talking about the over-hyped  cyber-stalker scare, I'm talking about 20 years from now when an HR rep sees a picture of the applicant seated in front of them at age 16, downing a shot of Tequila. Irregardlessly, this is not a school's job. A school's job is to educate kids, not hinder them. What I want to see is a high school, anywhere in America, offer an elective course in Netiquette and the use of Social Networking sites such as MySpace and Friendster. It would end up getting all the valley girls to sign up because it has the word "MySpace" in the title, and the computer nerds would sign up because it has the word "Net." That would truly be a great day in our country... *tear*

Ah well, sucks to be a student in District 128.

So I was as psyched as the next guy nerd when I read a few days ago that AIM was (in an obvious effort to beat Skype's recent announcement of free outgoing calls to US and Canadian phones) giving out a free, local incoming VoIP number to its users. This means, with me being in the 630 area code, that I would get a 630.xxx.xxxx number that would route to my PC and pick up calls. If I wasn't signed into AIM, it would send a voicemail to my e-mail. Pretty awesome, right? Yeah, until I go to sign up and see this:

http://pdl.stream.aol.com/aol/us/moviefone/movies/2006/casinoroyale_018129/casinoroyale_trlr_01_maleos_hiq_dl.mov

Looking good.

Only thing is, that new actor looks more like a villain than James Bond.

Completely unrelated (I think) to my previous annoyance, my router is one step away from being chucked out the window and replaced.

The concept of a router is to take a single Internet connection and disperse it among several computers. It does this through a method known as DHCP, which assigns an internal IP address to each computer connected to the router. This allows one Internet/external IP to be used by several computers to access the Internet at the same time.

I've never had a problem with this router before. It's a Netgear WGR614, your standard basic wireless-g router. I previously used a Hawking Tech router, but after dropped packets every 10 minutes (even with a wired connection) and eventually a dead WAN Uplink port, I have since taken a sledgehammer and a lighter to that router.

Anyway, somehow my DHCP was "released" without being "renewed" -- a term meaning the external IP wasn't being acknowledged by the router, so all my PCs were assigned 0.0.0.0 as the IP address, needless to say, an invalid one. At first when this started (around 3:00 am) I thought it was SBC's crappy DSL service down again. That's usually resolved in a few hours, so I went to bed expecting to find a working Internet when I woke up. 8 am: No Internet. Okay, so I started working on my final exam project for Computer Science 2, a course in VB6 game programming. My Monopoly board is about halfway done, and all the rent/price info has been typed up. Several hours later, I couldn't take it anymore. I went up two flights of stairs to the location of the modem/router. All systems green on the modem. Direct connection to the upstairs PC gave me Internet, so it had to be a problem with the router. I went through and looked at my connection status, and the DHCP info all had been erased ("released"). A simple click of the Renew button fixed the problem. Something the router should be doing automatically (it does this normally every 10 minutes, in case SBC changes my assigned IP address). Anyway, I'm obviously back online... but that router better not mess up again.

Ways to celebrate:

• http://www.jackvschuck.com/
• http://www.bauercount.com/

The latest project consuming my time has been the setting up "from the ground up" of my first server for colocation. Colocation basically means I buy, build, and own the server, and ship it to a data center, which is a big building with a fast Internet connection. It's a step up from paying $200+ a month to lease an equivalent server. (Well, in terms of price per month, I suppose it's a step down.)

I am of course using Linux, and after deciding Debian was too tricky, and since I'm used to RPM-based distributions like Red Hat, I decided to use Fedora Core 5 for the operating system. FC5 is a relatively new OS, so as with all new environments, there's backwards compatability problems coming out of my ears.

Instead of installing RPMs or using the yum package manager, I've opted to configure and compile most of the server software myself. This allows for much greater control over configuration and options, but it also opens up worlds of ways for me to mess up. My latest problem has been with APF.

APF is the de-facto software firewall for Linux machines. It's a glorified frontend for iptables, which is a set of features (optionally) compiled into the kernel (Linux's core) for basic port/IP-based blocking. Yes, I know that made no sense to you. This post is more of a FYI for me for the next time FC5's kernel (I'm currently running 2.6.16-1.2111) gets in my way. This particular kernel version is missing the ipt_state module, which APF needs to function. Here's the fix I've come across that seems to working pretty well for me:

ln -s /lib/modules/2.6.16-1.2111_FC5/kernel/net/netfilter/xt_state.ko /lib/modules/2.6.16-1.2111_FC5/kernel/net/ipv4/netfilter/ipt_state.ko

Problem solved. I should really get to bed... 1:30 am and school tomorrow. Er, today. :S

UPDATE: [May 27, 2006] Just updated my kernel to 2.6.16-1.2122... and broke APF. Turns out I'll be doing this for every new kernel. :-/

Technorati Tags: apf, FC5, fedora, fedora core 5, fedora core, advanced policy firewall, linux, kernel, fix