DD-WRT ships with two implementations of Quality of Service: HTB and HTSC (known to be buggy). My experience with each over time has been that they both kind of work and then fail miserably. Part of the problem might just be that QoS really complicated, and DD-WRT hasn’t had a release in two years.

However, a few weeks ago, I came across something new to me called TCP Vegas. A lot of people have had QoS problems with DD-WRT, and one poster suggested I enter several commands in the Administration section of my DD-WRT router.

echo 0 > /proc/sys/net/ipv4/tcp_westwood
echo 1 > /proc/sys/net/ipv4/tcp_vegas_cong_avoid
echo 3 > /proc/sys/net/ipv4/tcp_vegas_alpha
echo 3 > /proc/sys/net/ipv4/tcp_vegas_beta

I turned QoS completely off, removed the Up & Down limits on my Internet connection, and just used the four commands above. It worked! I can now download podcasts, stream video, surf the net and take phone calls without worrying about my VoIP connection occasionally messing up. Of course, my speedy DSL provider (Sonic.net) helps, too.

The thing is, I was tired of buying heavy, bulky, dead-tree books–waiting for them to arrive via UPS–only to read them once or twice. Collecting hundreds of pounds of books is taxing over time. I read reviews of the Kindle, and with Amazon’s 30 day return policy, I convinced myself to place an order. My 3 week wait was hell! (Amazon has since caught up with demand, and the Kindle is in stock).

When the package arrived, I was up & running in no time. I bought The Omnivore’s Dilemma and Snow Crash right away from the Kindle store. The device really did become transparent after the first hour. I even like the page-turn screen refresh blip that some reviewers call out as a negative–it feels like natural feedback.

Jeff Bezos really did create the iPod equivalent for books–the Amazon bookstore is iTunes. You can download free sample chapters from any book before you buy (how many crappy books have I bought from airport news stands), and if you want to add content you already own, no problem! There are thousands of awesome out-of-copyright books available for free on the Internet.

You buy & manage all of your documents over the Kindle’s built-in Internet connection without ever having to use a computer or setup wireless networks. You want to add a PDF or Word document? Just e-mail it as an attachment to your Kindle.

This eBook reader even has an experimental web browser. It’s a bit slow and black & white only, but the browser works surprisingly well with Javascript. I’d have to respectfully disagree with Andy Ihnatko’s assessment that Amazon is selling a “$399 waffle maker.” The Kindle is first and foremost a brilliant eBook reader. Web browsing is convenient when you’re away from a computer (and awesome that Amazon doesn’t send you a monthly bill), but Kindle Internet surfing doesn’t hold a candle to web browsing on a laptop or iPhone. I don’t think anyone would be happy with a Kindle if they didn’t use it primarily as a reading device.

I also recently signed up for an Audible account to listen to Steve Martin read his latest book, Born Standing Up. (thanks to Twit for the terrific recommendation) It’s surprisingly convenient to have audiobooks on your Kindle when your eyes are too tired to read. Audible’s got a great selection of stuff, and any book you buy through their store will also work on your iPod/iPhone. It is a royal pain in the ass getting the Audible book onto the Kindle, though–you have to use (ugh) Windows.

I hate DRM with a passion. It’s the main reason why I don’t buy songs from the iTunes store anymore (I use the Amazon DRM-free MP3 store). DRM is terrible and archaic in all forms, but it does encourage old-economy book publishers to sell books for electronic readers.

DRM is slightly more palatable on eBooks compared to MP3s and video. I typically only read books one time through. Even though I’d like to be able to copy sections from a book onto my laptop, I would never want to read an eBook on a backlit, eye-straining screen. Amazon have said they will likely drop DRM from Audible books. However, convincing book publishers to do the same will take time.

Whenever I hear about a book that sounds interesting, I’ll send the sample to my Kindle. Reading through the first few chapters gives me a sense whether I’d enjoy the book or not. It’s only ever really sad when a book publisher hasn’t yet released an electronic copy.

If you enjoy reading, the Kindle is a terrific reading device. I love my Kindle.

Dave Winer posted this same sentiment earlier today on his blog, Scripting News. In case you don’t know, Winer created a little thing called RSS (syndication for blogs) and RSS with enclosures (which allows people to subscribe to podcasts).

Next Tuesday is “Super Tuesday” where 24 states (including California) will hold primary elections or caucases.

Of all the candidates, Barack Obama has captured the attention of the entire tech community. Jeffrey Veen (Google), Wil Shipley (Delicious Monster), Dave Winer, Fake Steve Jobs, John Hodgman (The Daily Show & the “PC” in Apple’s ads), and even Randall Munroe (creator of XKCD) have publicly shown their support for Barack Obama.

Lawrence Lessig talks about Obama’s plans for truly open government standards:

Obama has committed himself to a technology policy for government that could radically change how government works. The small part of that is simple efficiency — the appointment with broad power of a CTO for the government, making the insanely backwards technology systems of government actually work.

But the big part of this is a commitment to making data about the government (as well as government data) publicly available in standard machine readable formats. The promise isn’t just the naive promise that government websites will work better and reveal more. It is the really powerful promise to feed the data necessary for the Sunlights and the Maplights of the world to make government work better. Atomize (or RSS-ify) government data (votes, contributions, Members of Congress’s calendars) and you enable the rest of us to make clear the economy of influence that is Washington.

Check out Lessig’s and Obama’s plan on technology and innovation.

As a bit of viral marketing, Dave Winer decided to add the “Progress” graphic at the top of this post to his blog as “a virtual equivalent of one of those signs people put on their front lawns.” Brilliant.

Read up on Barack Obama’s views. Watch his speeches on YouTube. And if you live in one of the “Super Tuesday” states, be sure to vote on February 5th.

PS-Check out Obey Giant’s gorgeous screen prints of the Obama graphic at the top of this post: http://obeygiant.com/post/obama

However, sometimes you are required to hand over personal information. When you buy an airline ticket, a book from Amazon, or seats for a concert through Ticketmaster, they force you to give them a telephone number.

These companies claim it’s for your own good–to alert you if the flight is delayed (ha!) or to prevent credit card fraud. However, if you click through the user-agreement, buried deep in their hundreds of pages of legalese, these companies are allowed to retain, data-mine and sell your personal contact information to whomever they please.

Last week, I signed up for a free service (for now) called GrandCentral. You sign up for a local number, and use this as a ’safe’ telephone number to hand out to people. GrandCentral will forward calls from this number to your home, work and cell phone number. You can set up rules to allow certain groups of people (friends / family / work / etc) to ring through while sending everyone else straight to voicemail. If someone’s harassing you, GrandCentral will let you permanently block them or give them a sneaky, “This number is no longer in service” message.

What’s really cool is that GrandCentral added spam filtering. Based on the caller id, they will send suspicious incoming calls directly to a quarantined voicemail box. If the caller blocks his number, you can have GrandCentral act as an operator, asking the caller to identify themselves by voice. GrandCentral then calls your private telephone number and lets you decide whether or not to let the call through.

You can configure GrandCentral to send an MP3 of your voicemail to you over e-mail or just logon to the webpage to manage it similar to GMail. GrandCentral also lets you dial-in to check your voicemail if you don’t have Internet access. There are tons of other features I haven’t yet explored. One of my favorite is the “WebCall Button”. It’s an embed-able form that lets people leave you a message from your webpage.

Sign up for a GrandCentral number if you want to take control over who contacts you through the telephone. It’s currently in Beta, but it looks like they’re processing new applications for the service fairly quickly. For now, I’m treating it as a ‘throw-away’ number since I’m not sure how much the service will cost when Google finally releases it to the world.

It might as well be from YouTube. What’s worse is you can’t download shows to watch on your iPod, TiVo, or laptop later. The selection is a joke, too–I want to have access to any episode of any show that was ever on NBC.

Techno-luddite television executives have not yet figured out what the music industry is slowly coming to terms with: DRM only hurts your best customers. Every single episode of The Office is available for download for free on the Internet in a completely portable format at much higher resolutions than you can get from Hulu, iTunes, Amazon, Netflix or anywhere else online video is sold.

It is impossible to stop piracy if there are no reasonably-priced good alternatives. I want to buy high definition, DRM-free, copies of shows at the exact same time they are broadcast on NBC’s television stations. NBC should be competing against The Pirate Bay, not trying to stop the BitTorrent firehose. Offer a product that is easy to use and satisfies my needs. iTunes isn’t perfect, but it’s pretty close.

NBC’s feud with iTunes is absolutely ridiculous, too. While it’s amazingly dumb to shackle iTunes downloads to Apple hardware, Steve Jobs is giving people a slightly more acceptable amount of freedom than NBC. It’s mind-numbing to try to understand why anyone would refuse to sell its shows through Apple.

Back in October, NBC’s Jeff Zucker said, “We know that Apple has destroyed the music business — in terms of pricing — and if we don’t take control, they’ll do the same thing on the video side.” However, yesterday he alluded that NBC may return to iTunes, “We’ve said all along that we admire Apple, that we want to be in business with Apple. We’re great fans of Steve Jobs.”

2008 is going to be a great year for video on the Internet. The writers’ strike might be an opportunity for video podcast producers to steal some of that audience from NBC. There are thousands of very high quality shows on the internet right now. Check out Tiki Bar TV, Diggnation, BoingBoing TV, MacBreak, Ask a Ninja, and Lynchland. They are all DRM-free. This is the future of television.

Just a few weeks ago, another NBC executive troll, Ben Silverman, remarked about the writers’ strike affecting the Golden Globes ceremony, “Sadly, it feels like the nerdiest, ugliest, meanest kids in the high school are trying to cancel the prom. But NBC wants to try to keep that prom alive.”

NBC’s clueless executives must change their attitudes. Give the writers what they want, and offer every show in their archives for sale through iTunes. Hulu.com needs to be shuttered or converted into a store to sell downloadable DRM-free content to everyone.

Unfortunately, Linksys/Belkin/D-Link and the other popular router manufacturers consider QoS to be an “enterprise” ($$$) feature. Their entry-level $35 routers are purposefully crippled to only provide the most basic functionality. These routers are disposable…the hardware lasts maybe 2 years; the interfaces are poorly designed, buggy, non-anthropomorphic and full of security holes.

DD-WRT is a wonderful open source replacement for the lousy software shipped with many routers. Check out some of DD-WRT’s features. I particularly liked the Dynamic DNS updater (DynDNS.org and others), PPTP VPN Client & Server, UPnP, and QoS!

I ditched my pretty–but pretty useless–Airport Extreme router for a cheap Linksys WRT-54g (version 6). Check out the huge list of supported devices, but beware of the version number of the router. It seems that manufacturers tend to include less memory and cheaper chips in later versions of their routers. You need a router with at least 2 MB of ram and a Broadcom chip. Search the DD-WRT forums before buying.

The upgrade was totally simple. Everything was working great on the Linksys router until a few months ago when 2 ports mysteriously died. Last weekend, the router decided to only allow Internet access for 3 minutes at a time–no VoIP/Port Forwarding/UPnP at all. I tried resetting it and reflashing DD-WRT onto the router…no luck. The hardware finally died.

Fortunately, I had an old D-Link router in the closet that couldn’t even do port forwarding. As a stop gap, I rushed out to BestBuy to get a Belkin F5D7230-4. Don’t buy this junk. DD-WRT cannot be installed on any of the recent versions. As a consumer router, it’s terrible. Some settings (like ‘enable UPnP’) don’t save properly in anything but Internet Exploder. Fortunately, since Belkin claims it is compatible with Mac OS X, BestBuy refunded the purchase without charging a restocking fee.

After a bunch of searching it turned out that none of the major brick & mortar retailers (BestBuy, RadioShack, CircuitCity, Fry’s, Staples, Office Depot/Max, etc) carried any router that looked promising. NewEgg, however, saved the day with a Asus WL-500g Premium router. This thing is so easy to flash–it has 32 MB of ram and the load on the router’s 264 MHz Broadcom chip has never gone above 20%.

If you’re not running DD-WRT, check out that list to see if your router is supported. Give it a try…it’s amazing what that ‘always-on miniature computer’ running your DHCP server is capable of.

Patrick gives the reader a gentle overview of objects, the MVC pattern, and the Ruby language before diving into his example application (a Digg.com-like Web 2.0 app). His example-driven teaching demonstrates how you can use Ruby on Rails in the real world. Development is fast!!

For the past several years, I have spent most of my professional life developing Java apps for large companies (Swing, Struts and JSF). Like most people, I’ve tried to balance that out with some more exciting environments like PHP, Objective-C, and other cool, weird frameworks. (Side note, check out CakePHP if you’re limited to a pure PHP environment. It’s very similar to Rails.)

This book had just the right amount of detail for me. Ruby is very natural and readable. The chapter that Patrick introduces the language, highlights where a new developer should pay attention. I’m definitely going to keep the PDF version of this book on hand as a great reference while I get more comfortable with Rails.

The only small criticism I have of the book is the amount of time dedicated to unit testing. Don’t get me wrong; I love automated testing. Writing a test case is a great way to describe how the system works, as well as a way to buy some insurance that what works today will work tomorrow. Tons of projects would seriously benefit from test-driven development. However, I believe that developers should spend more time on writing solid functional tests rather than simple, basic, voluminous unit tests. I rarely find any value in testing every single getter & setter on a model. That being said, Patrick’s functional testing sections (especially the ones that tested the views) were very exciting. I have a feeling I’m going to like test-driven development in Ruby on Rails.

Even though this book was released almost a year ago (January 2007), I still think it’s a great read. Patrick covers Rails 1.2 in the book, and almost everything from the book worked without a hitch. From what I hear about Rails 2.0, it’s more of an evolutionary rather than revolutionary upgrade. Check out Ryan Daigle’s post for a thorough list of everything new in 2.0.

Ruby on Rails is an exciting framework, and I can’t wait to develop some of the ideas that have been kicking around in my head. If you’ve been wanting to try out Rails, go get this book!

http://www.sitepoint.com/books/rails1/

I highly recommend the DRM-free PDF version of his book. Really, all developer books should be available in a simple PDF format (copy & pasting code snippets, portability, bookmarking and searching for later reference, easy storage & backup, good for the environment, cheaper production costs…).

I dig Mac OS X, sweet open source software, Java, Objective-C Cocoa, Ruby on Rails, and tons and tons of random cool blogs and podcasts.

Enjoy!