Reconfigured my workstation. Put my Performa 6115CD Macintosh into inactivity, arranged my PC keyboard into a more ergonomic position.
Did some research on the new Graffiti system on the new Palm PDAs. Now they are using a Jot (used in Windows CE/Pocket PC) version dubbed Graffiti 2, which actually is slower than the original Graffiti input method, however, the original Graffiti was in dispute with Xerox, a lawsuit was filed by Xerox. That's the main motivation for Palm to shift to the slower Graffiti 2. For me current Palm III and Palm IIIx, Graffiti is still perfect and fast, although my GoType keyboard can be much faster than both Graffiti input methods.
Watched the movie Timeline in Kips Bay theater. IMHO, the movie is a poor adaptation of Michael Crichton's novel. Much of the plot is changed, characters modified. In general, it is below my expectation. I read almost all of Michael Crichton's books. I am about to begin his Prey soon, if I have the time.
Today is Thanksgiving. It is a quite Thanksgiving for us. Watched TV the whole afternoon. There was a PBS show about life of pioneers on the 1883. Three families was thrown into Montana, given only 1883 equipment, to see if they can survive the frontier life. It is quite long.
Remembered one episode of The Simpsons, was a satire of this show.
Formatted and converted a lot of e-books in Palm Doc formats. Now I have a quite long reading list.
Finished reading The Children of Captain Grant by Jules Verne. Quite a read, it is a long novel! Circumnavigate the globe at latitude 37 south, interesting and fantastic adventures!
Realized that MakeDocW program cannot convert Doc to txt format. Only the command line program MakeDoc can do that. It takes me a while to locate a copy of MakeDoc. It seems command line programs are still much more powerful that the GUI counterpart, and more flexible.
Almost finished The World Jones Made by Philip K. Dick. Depressing, but well written.
Borrowed The World Jones Made and The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch by Philip K. Dick.
Watched the Tomb Raider 2 DVD. Lots of actions, zero content.
Pondering the security problem of my Windows PC. It seems that the IP address 64.21.49.17 is quite strange, it is hard to track.
I am happy I mainly use my Macintoshes to check emails.
Watched the Movie Matrix Revolution. Not bad, fit to my expectation.
Detected suspicious Internet traffic on my Windows PC. It is running Windows 98 First Edition. Downloaded a Ad-Aware and ZxSniffer. With Ad-Aware, I found a lot of suspicious stuff in the registry and cookies folder. With ZxSniffer, I sniffed the suspicious Internet traffic to 64.21.49.17.
The strange thing happened: while I try to track the traffic, it stopped immediately. It never came back again. Either the virus is smart, or its program was destroyed by Ad-Aware. I am not sure, it still remain a mystery.
Found a tool to convert .lit (MS Reader) file to HTML. The web site is: http://www.convertlit.com. It is handy when no TXT or HTML available.
Downloaded a MS Reader from Microsoft. It lacks a Menu bar and Open menu, you must open the .lit files from the Windows Explorer. That's weird, disobeying the User Interface design principles. Not like it. If possible, I prefer the Palm Reader, which accepts the Palm Doc file format, and the format is an open format.
Obtained some e-books by Patrick O'Brian. He wrote the Master and Commander and a lot of seafaring sagas. The Russell Crowe movie Master and Commander: The far side of the world was adapted from his book Master and Commander and The Far Side of the World.
Discovered the newsgroup alt.binaries.e-book. It's official FAQ at http://ebook.23ae.com.
Obtained a program "Convert Doc", can convert between several formats, including PDF, HTML,etc. A valuable tool for making e-books.
Watched Terminator 2 DVD again. It is the third time. I watched it twice at the movie theaters.
Obtained a lot of e-books. A good site is Project Gutenberg, I have a link in my bookmark page. It mainly contains books of the public domain.
Finished Jules Verne's 20,000 leagues under the seas. Lengthy and enjoyable. I don't mind those lengthy "info dumps". Actually, I enjoy them.
Project Gutenberg has quite a lot Verne works.
Some tips while making Palm Doc e-books from Project Gutenberg.
Because Project Gutenberg e-books use line break at each line instead of a paragraph, it looks ugly on PDA. To remove the line breaks but preserving the paragraph delimiters, do the following:
For Chinese documents, there are some special procedures. The most significant difference is Chinese documents usually don't contains spaces, so spaces can be safely removed under most circumstances.
Finished Jules Verne's Mysterious Island. It seems he screwed the chronology of Captain Nemo with 20,000 leagues under the seas. I need to check.
A friend visit us.
Saw the Moon Eclipse in the cold wind.
Watched the horror movie The Ring. Scary, but not very much. Like all the horror movies, it never make any sense at all. It is based on the Japanese horror movie Ringo, which enjoys a cult fandom. I don't think I will be a fan.
Just found that peanutpress.com was purchased by Palm. Now you can download Palm Reader, which can read Palm Doc format on Windows PC, Pocket PC, Macintosh, and Palm. It is cross-platform, and Palm Doc is open format. MS Reader is closed. I don't like Microsoft, anyway.
Surprised to find I already accumulated 60 video tapes. That's 360 hours video. I don't need to buy more for a long time to come. I do have a Salome by Richard Strauss! I forgot it long time ago.
Read the first part of Mysterious Island by Jules Verne. It is strange that in the English version, Captain Cyrus Smith is renamed as Cyrus Harding. The translator must have fancy ideas about names.
Took advantage of CVS digital photo promotion, printed ten free photos. That's good.
Read a lot of New Yorker articles about movies. That's a movie issue.
Last time I wrote that the wireless link between two Ethernet networks should be a router. I think it over, check the book, and I think I made a mistake. From the book Local and Metropolitan Area Networks, page 133:
The bridge is designed for interconnection of LANs that use identical protocols at the MAC layer (e.g. all conforming to IEEE 802.3 or all conforming to FDDI). Because the devices all use the same protocols, the amount of processing required at the bridge is minimal.
... frequently, the bridge function is performed by two "half bridges," one on each LAN. The functions of the bridge are few and simple ...
I have a simple diagram to illustrate the situation:
From this diagram, we can see the connection between the two half bridges can be either wired or wireless, it is just a connection inside the bridge, not necessarily a part of the networking protocols. If the connection is wireless, it is not different from the wireless link between two walkie-talkies, it does not actively take part in the LAN protocols, it is just a physical link inside the bridge, if we see the two half bridges as a single bridge.
So since both networks are Ethernet (802.3) network, operating at the same MAC protocols, so the device(s) that connect(s) them together should be a bridge instead of a router. The following diagram should clarify the situation.
Watched the DVD Killing me Softly, noticed that it was directed by the Chinese director Chen Kaige, that's interesting. Never know that he has such a style, which he never showed in his Chinese movies. Funny.
Last week, I was thinking about how to connect my home net wirelessly. During the process, I gathered that I need to brush up my network knowledge. Here is the note I took while I was reading the text book.
First, the text book:
| Title: | Local and Metropolitan Area Networks |
| Edition: | 6 |
| Author: | William Stallings |
| ISBN: | 0-13-012939-0 |
| Year: | 2000 |
| Publisher: | Prentice-Hall, Inc |
| Pages: | 478 |
First, to discuss the networking technology, we must briefly review the reference models mostly used: OSI, and TCP/IP. The following diagram depicts their relationship:
Figure-1 OSI and TCP/IP Reference Models
Then, considering Ethernet and other IEEE 802 LANs, we need the following diagram:
Figure-2 OSI reference model and IEEE 802 model
From the diagram, we know that IEEE 802 networks only concern low level OSI protocols. It is below the Network layer of OSI, and Internet (IP) layer of TCP/IP.
For all those IEEE 802 networks, LLC is the same, the difference lies on the MAC (Media Access Control) and lower layers. Depending on the MAC protocols, we have Ethernet (802.3) networks, Token-Ring (802.5) networks, Wi-Fi (802.11), etc.
Because the MAC layer is quite low in the protocol layers, other higher level protocols are independent on the different LANs. You can run TCP/IP, or AppleTalk on Ethernet, Token-Ring, FDDI, and ATM networks.
The terminology bothers me most are router, bridge. Here I clarify the differences.
Router:
A router is a processor that connects two networks and whose primary function is to relay data from one network to the other on its route from the source to the destination end system.
or
An intermediate system used to connect two networks that may or may not be similar. The router employs an internet protocol present in each router and each end system of the network. The router operates at layer 3 (Network Layer) of the OSI model.
Figure-3: Router
Bridge:
An intermediate system used to connect two LANs that use similar LAN protocols. The bridges acts as an address filter, picking up packets from one LAN that are intended for a destination on another LAN and passing those packets on. The bridge does not modify the contents of the packets and does not add anything to the packet. The bridge operates at layer 2 (Data link layer) of the OSI model.
The main difference between routers and bridges is that routers operate on a higher level (level 3, Network layer), and bridges operate on level 2, the data link layer.
Intermediate system:
A device used to connect two networks and permit communication between end systems attached to different networks.
Repeaters, hubs, and switches operate on physical layer, lower than bridges. Hubs and switches are 10BaseT and 100BaseT devices, and switches have better performance because a switch allows two end systems to communicate at the maximum data rates, comparing to hubs, which would divide the bandwidth among communicating end systems.
Return to the question I asked several days ago: to connect two wired Ethernet with a wireless link, the device should be at least a router, because Wi-Fi and Ethernet use different MAC mechanisms, a bridge need the two networks operating on the same MAC level.
I will keep on researching on Wi-Fi. I will write my study notes here, as usual.