In a few recent interviews as a PHP developer applying for LAMP stack contributing developer positions I’ve been asked the following NON-TECHNICAL questions:

If you were given a box of pencils, list 3 things you could do with them that are not their traditional use.

My answer: I’d juggle them, practice my trigger pull (pencil in barrel marking a wall) & play Pick-Up-Stix.

Why do you want this position?

If you could be any street sign, what would you be?

My answer: .. was all over the place. lol. An interstate sign for a left exit! Then I had a lap of judgement and said “A useful one” to which the interviewer responded, “That would be all of them”.  Fine, Not a speed limit sign though.!.

Explain a day in the life of a developer.

Explain your approach to coding.

How do you choose user stories and estimate time.

I’ve really enjoyed some of the interviews I’ve participated in. I’ve also totally bombed at least one of the three I’ve had. lol.  If there is one thing I would stress over everything ( understanding we’re applying for jobs we have the skill set to back up ) is to be positive, inquisitive and engage the hiring staff interviewing you.  As a developer, we’re supposed to be magical sources of logic based creativity. So keep the logic mind on and be magical. ^_^

Props to Comcast who even managed to slide in “Miracles (Daily!)” on their Job Opportunity doc under a “Typical Activities” section. lol.

Step 1: Visit the local ARC thrift store and purchase some outdoor sports equipment.

For this example I bought some roller blades for $12.99.

Z and I also acquired an awesome set of diving boots and fins for a future adventure for the same price.

Step 2: Find a park.

In this example I went a couple blocks down from the Arc to Clement Park at Johnson Reservoir to skate the features.

Step 3: Enjoy lazy or intense fun

Despite trying to break myself, I broke the blades.

Step 4: Grab a bit to eat somewhere near by.

I grabbed food w/Z at Sweet Tomato which was across the street from the park.  Great stuff.

Step 5: Go Home when it hails

This was fun

UPDATE:  The Heartbleed vulnerability is of course multitudes simpler and thus a significantly easier means to the same end.  ^_^

The following is a screenshot from a computer that’s been quite obviously hosed. I won’t even ask why….  Walking past the rabbit hole & moving along.

  No, no background will be provided on this post beyond the simple facts.

1. I didn’t do it.
2. I’m the only one with access to this computer
3. I wasn’t present during the timestamp. (pre-time reverse fail huh?  yeah)

I’m not sure if Google is just trying to keep us on our toes but it makes absolutely no sense that the 5th and 6th result links when I searched for PHP Database Design were published in 2006. Content age doesn’t always equate to a good thing. In this context it’s just silly yet there will be people learning from this, very likely lots of people.

when(old != good){}

What the heck?  MySQL Workbench has crashed a couple times on me today and now I get this:

I may just be confused because I’m annoyed at the  moment but is this not a setup to lose data? lol.  I have an option to continue and open an auto-saved version thus losing the recovery or let it try and recover data saved at the exact same time?

I’ll take the hint and stop poking at MySQL Workbench in between tasks for today at least.  I’m confused and workbench is broken. lol.

KidsQuest.mdb KidsQuest_DBModel.pdf

I find it entertaining that Google Chrome happily consumes virtually all the resources our computers can put out in many cases while at the exact same time I (or the collective we as web developers I suppose) are configuring virtual machine dev environments that Vagrant Up as identical clones of our systems live production environment (read: operating system) totally happy n’ snappy being allotted a single Gigabyte of memory.  If that…  lol.  Then there’s Chrome which was just a moment ago consuming over 5 Gigs of memory. I may have closed a few tabs before the screen shot but you get the idea. ^_^

Next time you find yourself trying not to buy something from the apple store, just remember that in order to logically weigh in that memory upgrade – go ahead and write off half your system memory to Chrome’s lay-on-the-couch-in-a-crowded-house comfort zone.  Then feel free to consider other things like Virtualbox or Fusion. ^_^

I’m switching to Opera for no less than the next 47 minutes.

I was encountering an error when trying to run tcpdump using the suspicious packets or other packets PCAP files generated by ntop as input. Tcpdump would display an error message stating the provided file was a “Truncated dump file” and die. the end. No beans.

The Workaround: Don’t run NTOP in daemon mode.
Don’t use the -d or –daemon command line argument. This also means that any common means of starting ntop as service such as with `/etc/init.d/ntop start` or `service ntop start` also results in failure.

The real answer: Stay current: As of this writing ntop has been replaced by it’s successor ntopng which is freely available and available freely: ntopng v.1.0 [stable] is available for download as pre-compiled packages or build-your-own from source of course. ^_^

Other then that I hadn’t resolved a real answer – however the NTOP Man Page warns about daemon mode under the –output-packet-path command line option. *shrug*

My Enviornment:

• NTOP v.4.1.0 (32 bit)
• Ubuntu [precise] 12.04.3 LTS
  • Linux hq 3.2.0-53-generic-pae #81-Ubuntu SMP
  • Thu Aug 22 21:23:47 UTC 2013
  • i686 i686 i386 GNU/Linux
• tcpdump version 4.2.1
• libpcap version 1.1.1

This post is old and out dated.

Please see my new post New DD-WRT Firmware for Netgear WNDR3400v2 for links to a more current DD-WRT firmware version with Heartbleed fix, NAT reversal and more!

Right on, It WORKS.!.

I’m not a fan of many devices with extremely limited administration interfaces, especially network devices so when the Netgear WNDR3400v2 resting behind the couch (in arms reach for easy wired laptop connections ^_^) suggested there was an update available I agreed. With a quick slight of hand I confused the slick little black n’ blue device long enough to upload a firmware file downloaded from this website. I would guess that it took less than 90 seconds to eliminate the less-than-flexible firmware provided by Netgear & replace it with the always friendly DD-WRT.  Mission accomplished without so much as a questionable pause or hiccup.

Warning: WNDR3400v2 is not supported

Unfortunately, as of this post DD-WRT is still not officially supported for the Netgear WNDR3400v2 wireless access point.  Actually, DD-WRT.com states that donation devices are needed and that the firmware is only a work in progress and offering no files, suggestions or other information.  I however didn’t really care for the device anyway especially considering it’s been flaking out lately so I searched Google for DD-WRT Firmware for WNDR3400v2, downloaded the first thing I saw and flashed it to the device.  Fully prepared to toss the failed brick in the ‘parts’ bin with the rest of the bits n’ pieces I’ve saved for Arduino & Raspberry Pi projects, I uploaded the extracted file dd-wrt.v24-K26_WNDR3400V2-25-02-2013.chk using the web management interface to the Netgear device and clicked upgrade.  To my amazement I was presented with the dd-wrt “set your username & password” page displayed after successful flashes!  Heck yeah!

Here’s some links to the file I used. You can download the file from the original source if you’d like or grab the ones I uploaded.  Either way, here are some links and MD5 Hash values.  The Zip compressed file is not any smaller then it’s extracted .chk file so either one is just as quick to download.

Download the Firmware

Firmware File (Uncompressed)

MD5:8cc51e081f3115cc2514b55595d1cc16
File size: 6.5 MB

dd-wrt.v24-K26_WNDR3400V2-25-02-2013.chk @ Copy.com

dd-wrt.v24-K26_WNDR3400V2-25-02-2013.chk @ BurnMyTime.com

Zipped Firmware File

MD5: a3477656f891e12c6bed0a9761eae400
File size: 6.5 MB

dd-wrt.v24-K26_WNDR3400V2-25-02-2013.zip @ Copy.com
dd-wrt.v24-K26_WNDR3400V2-25-02-2013.zip @ BurnMyTime.com

Installing DD-WRT

1. Acknowledge to yourself that what you are about to do has a high potential to render your wireless access point useless.  I’m not personally sure what the real likely-hood of creating a paperweight out of your AccessPoint actually is but if you like your WNDR3400v2 as much as I did mine then it’s just as good bricked as it is functional.  Lets move forward and hope for 1337 results!
2. Locate & Login to the Web Admin – Netgear Genie web administration portal usually at http://192.168.1.1 or whatever it claims your default gateway to be if you plug in to it and let it DHCP issue your network settings after resetting the device to factory defaults.
3. Reset to Factory Defaults – If you haven’t yet reset the device to factory defaults – navigate to the advanced tab -> administration -> backup settings page and click ‘erase’. That’s all I did to reset it anyway. I could have 30/30/30 reset it while patting my head n’ rubbing my belly but I didn’t care to find a paperclip to hold the reset button while cycling the power nor could I find any lolzcats to photo.
4. Upload Firmware Upgrade – With your WNDR3400v2 at the factory default settings again visit the HTTP Genie Admin portal and bypass the internet setup junk.  Do what it takes to get to the Advanced Tab then Administration (I believe) and finally the Upgrade page.   Click browse & browse your computer for the .CHK file you downloaded and/or extracted from the downloaded .zip .
5. Click [Upgrade] – Confirm that you do in fact want to take over the world and are not willing to accept payment for doing so….  Wrong admin panel.   Just agree to the warning dialogs and such and wait a minute or two.   I didn’t have to do anything else except refresh the http page I was viewing and whala – it displayed the dd-wrt password update form.!.

Sadly I didn’t make note of what firmware version I previously had from Netgear however it’s whatever version just got replaced today or perhaps yesterday as this post is being published the day after. I’ll follow up in a week to report how well the Netgear WNDR3400v2 is performing with DD-WRT.  I’ll donate the device to dd-wrt.com if it acts twitchy so everything will end well regardless. So far it’s working great though. Cheers!

Katherine Heights Townhomes

Z and I volunteered to create the monthly newsletter that gets delivered to all the residents of our community here in Katherine Heights. Our goal is to establish a publishing schedule, workflow, design template and ‘system’ in which most of the newsletter process could be automated. Since we’ve managed printed newsletters & digital E-Mail Marketing campaigns in the past we saw a clear opportunity to organize and implement a bit of organization. With a little structure & intent the whole process of creating, editing & publishing the newsletter should be much more efficient and error resistant through the automatic re-use of existing articles, schedules and so on.

This month we established the publishing schedule, basic workflow and setup & implemented the tools with which we (the front office, or whoever wishes to be responsible for it) will manage and maintain future publications.

We’ve been using podio to support many of our projects as well as our business workflow so it didn’t take much effort to setup a Podio Workspace for the Katherine Heights Newsletter.  Adding apps for Article management, built in version-monitoring for simple editing, discussions, reader input (both signed & anonymous), an events calendar and tied it all together with a publishing schedule to keep us on track.  With the workflow and information framework in place, starting in October we’ll be exporting data from Podio directly in to the newsletter template for printing.

If all goes well, by November we will have nearly completely automated the creation of every subsequent month’s newsletter.  A step up in quality, a step around unnecessary labor and errors, and a step in toward enhancing community involvement as we begin making the resources available for external input.  I’m excited – I love it when technology makes things easier rather then being a point of frustration. With a small amount of documentation created and stored in Podio I hope to see this more simple, efficient system stick around for a long time to come.

Here’s the front and back of September’s Newsletter.

[September-Front] [September-back]

Podio – Simple & Effective Workflow Resources