Dell's project Sputnik

Dell's project Sputnik now annouce for beta tester.

To participate in the beta program, you will need to fill in the forms.

Turn your Gigaset SE567 modem into a switch / bridge mode

Original article from (Turn your Gigaset SE567 modem into a wireless switch / bridge mode)

Follow these directions to turn your Gigaset (Siemens SE567) modem/wifi router combo into a wireless switch (bridge mode) that will work with any ISP/Ethernet uplink:

1. First of all, reset your SE567 to its factory settings. Hold the button on the bottom in until the power light starts alternating green and red.
2. After the SE567 reboots, connect to port 1 with your computer.
3. Go to »192.168.1.254/ and log in (on the top right) using ID: admin, PW: telus
4. Go through the Setup Wizard (or manually, your choice) and configure your security and any other settings the way you want them. When you are done you will be asked to reboot.
5. Go to the above URL and log in once again.
6. Go to the following URL to turn on bridge mode: »192.168.1.254/brgmode.htm This URL is not anywhere in the settings, you will have to go there manually. You will be asked to reboot the SE567 once again.
7. After rebooting, unplug your computer from port 1 and plug your WAN connection into port 4. You should now be able to access the SE567 with your laptop and the security settings you applied to it.

Note, when in bridge mode, the SE567 will not function as the router it once did. It functions as a wireless switch and is not capable of assigning IP addresses and will only pass an IP to your computer from the WAN device it is connected to. The LAN ports on the back will not function, and you are unable to access the SE567's settings unless you reset it again. If you require multiple wireless connections, you can either have your ISP assign multiple IP addresses or you can plug the SE567 into an old wired router, which will also assign more than one IP address over the switch.

SE567's wireless is not very robust and sometimes I failed to get connection even just sit besides it. I turned off the wireless of the box completely and only use it as a switch connecting to my own wireless router.

TeX and TeXiA

I have been quite fond of TeX and LaTeX since my first encounter of it.  The type set document looks the best and professional compare with other word processors.  But it is hard to use when you trying to change the default way of text layout.  The TeX macro language is quite hard to understand even I myself am professional programmer.

Over the years, I would like to see if I could come out a better one, but due to various reasons and my own laziness,  there is no progress.  I finally set myself to start a little bit by re-implementing the TeX engine in Ada - TeXiA, for the purpose to understand how TeX work internally and learning the Ada programming language at the same time.  The progress is slow, currently the project just started and not yet reach section 100 of TeX: The Program (Massachusetts: Addison-Wesley, 1986). ISBN 0-201-13437-3.

I found the programming style of TeX, the literate programming introduced by Donald Knuth, hard to follow for me.  I'm not a smart guy as Donald.  I have to refer to a few C implementations to understand the whole picture: the texlive web2c version, yytex and Common TeX.

There are several other projects that related to computer typesetting are quite interesting:

• XeTeX
• LuaTeX
• The Lout project
• ant is not TeX
• TeXmacs