Last week my little brother had a bit of a delimma, one that he knew could only be solved by yours truly. After a quick diagnosis it was quite apparent that this man was having severe video game withdrawal and needed to pwn some n00bs as soon as possible. I quickly instructed him that Half Life 2 bundled with Counter Strike: Source was his best bet for relieving himself of this ailment, so forty dollars and two hours later he's at his house installing Half Life 2. Unfortunately, he couldn't get Steam to connect and authenticate his install, so I came over to help troubleshoot and lend moral support. So begins the events that would lead up to the design and construction of The Ghettotenna.

First thing I noticed was that he could browse the web just fine, it was only Steam that couldn't get out. Actually the first thing I noticed was that his computer was littered with spyware, but that's a different post all together. Second thing I noticed was that his wifi connection was on the rather Piss-Poor end of the spectrum. Thinking the signal strength may be the cause for this sketchy behavior, I set out to boost his reception to see if it would solve the problem.

Luckily, he was using one those USB wifi fobs on a cord for his wifi adaptor. Being the genius I am, and having read quite a bit about people boosting wifi signals with chinese wok utensils and Pringles cans, I knew I could whip up a ghetto solution in no time flat. Here is where we enter the meat of this post and the explanation of that weird ass piece of crap up there.

I start calling out to my brother for materials: Scissors, check. Shoe Box, check. Aluminum foil, check. Tape. Tape. Tape? No go on the tape so I quickly raid his closet and find a pristine box of Band-Aids. I won't let this mission be grounded by a simple missing ingredient, so I throw all my materials (and the Band-Aids) together in a pile and get to work.

First, I take the lid to the shoe box and cut the angled lip off the edges so that it's just a flat piece of cardboard a little larger than a standard sheet of paper. Next I wrap said sheet of cardboard multiple times in aluminum foil and tape Band-Aid it in place. Now that I have my signal reflecting surface, I roll in into a half-circle and tape Band-Aid one of the strips I cut off in step one across the opening to make it retain its shape. Once all of this was assembled I taped Band-Aided the adaptor to the shape-retaining strip of cardboard so that it would be in the dead center of the semi circle.

Here's a diagram of where my thought processes were going with this. The black represents the semi-circular reflector, the grey spot is the adaptor, and the green represents magic wifi signals that I can't actually prove exist. Or bounce off aluminum. Or remotely resemble crappy green dotted lines. Click on it to get a larger picture of it. Yeah, I know. Drink in its beauty.

With everything together, I plugged it in, pointed the open end of it in the general direction of the access point, and BAM! His signal shot from "Low" to hovering between "Very Good" and "Excellent"(a two to three bar jump on a five bar scale). Once my brother's roommate witnessed this, he sprang into action, his movements a blur of Band-Aids and aluminum foil.

This story is not without heartbreak, unfortunately. As anyone well versed in wifi knows, a low signal, as long as it is steady and doesn't fluctuate, is perfectly fine and doesn't interfere with connectivity at all. He still couldn't get Steam to connect, and it wasn't until I got his neighbor's router login info did I realize what the problem was. Someone had filtered a handful of ports that, for reasons unknown, included the ports that Steam uses to communicate on. So our story ends on a high note, our hero is rewarded with a higher wifi signal and unadulterated n00b pwnage.

PS. For anyone interested, Jason modeled and rendered the beautiful image up there in Blender, an open source 3D Studio Max alternative. Here are examples of the source materials I gave him to base his model off of:

I feel sorry for all those people that threw thousands down the toilet for an engineering degree. Some people are just born with it, holmes.

Contrary to popular belief, being a rabid Nintendo fanboy doesn't automatically color my opinion of Sony's PSP. I like the PSP, it's a strong handheld, it looks great and the technology behind it is amazing. Unfortunately there are few games for it, and even fewer that are actually good. Like zero. I'm sure that will change with time, but if it doesn't then it wouldn't be the first technologically superior portable to have its ass handed to it by the Gameboy stranglehold. The list of units that have been spanked by Nintendo is as long as it is distinguished. Here's a brief summary:

• Sega Gamegear - 1989
• Atari Lynx - 1989
• Turbo GFX Turbo Express - 1990
• Neo Geo Pocket Color - 1998
• Bandai WonderSwan Color - 2000

That's by no means a complete list, and doesn't even begin to take into account the units that had worse hardware than the Gameboy.

So, Sony's PSP games are woefully bad and they're in a market that looks kind of like a battlefield, the ground soaked with the blood of the would-be brave, and there in the distance stands the Gameboy with its teeth bared and its claws unsheathed. But that's ok, they have their ace in the hole: Movies!

Yep, that's right, you can buy movies for your PSP! That means you can watch a movie on your PSP if you're on a plane, or if you're.. on a... plane, or maybe if you're in an airport! There's really no other place than on a plane that their marketing department could come up with for needing a portable movie, and that's not really their fault, I mean, there really aren't all that many places you'd want one.

This isn't to discredit watching movies on a plane or any comparable confined, boring situation. On the contrary, the ability to watch movies is a miracle in these situations, that's why God invented laptops that can play anything from the DVD movie library that you've already dumped too much money into. Not to mention the already existing portable DVD player market. Hell, my set top DVD player is actually a portable DVD player that I have my TV in's jacked into and the screen turned off on. Anytime I want I can unplug it and take it with me.

So you've resigned yourself with the fact that you're going to shell out some mullah for movies that you can only watch on one device, when you've got two and a half hours to kill doing nothing, and you can't leave. And you have to hold it up to your face. And its screen is the size of a playing card. You can always console yourself with the fact that PSP UMD movies will cost a whopping $1.00 less than a friggin DVD copy of the same movie. If that's not enough, if you actually buy the pile that is Amazon.com's apocryphal pre-discount List Price, you'll see that normally they cost the same damn thing. Now for the sake of full disclosure, newly released movies are priced much higher than the Terminator 2 DVD while newly released UMD movies are only marginally more expensive, but seriously, how long does it take for a new release to end up with a sub $20 price tag?

And that's my take on the situation: PSP movies are going to fail. Badly. Sony came out swinging with their report of 100,000 movies sold for the device, but the ever-vigilant Brian over at Kotaku quickly put the kibosh on any such celebration by noting that figure represents only 5% of PSP owners buying a UMD movie, even less if you figure there were poeple that bought multiple movies. The DVD player market couldn't survive having only 5% of owners buy DVDs and I doubt the PSP will be able to.

Granted, not having a movie market isn't going to kill the PSP by any stretch of the imagination. It will just have to stand on its own two legs as a game platform, and if you're wondering what I think its chances are as strictly a gaming device, well, re-read the first paragraph of this article.

I could be wrong, maybe someone will come along and publish a good game for it.

Here's what I think will change: Nothing. Zip. Ziltch. You'll be making snowmen at Hitler's house before Apple even dreams of letting MacOS X run on commodity hardware. This makes Apple no more a threat to Microsoft than it's already been. This will not take focus away from Linux on the x86 architecture. Apple will continue down the path it's been on since rehiring Steve Jobs eight or nine years ago and retain a stranglehold on what machines their operating system is allowed to be put on. You will still only be able to run a Mac OS on a machine produced by Apple. You won't be downloading a pirated version of (or buying a copy of for that matter) MacOS X Tiger for Intel and installing it on your Pentium III. Ain't going to happen.

Now, as a tip of my hat to the dogged determination of hackers around the globe, I'm sure projects here and there will pop up on SourceForge explaining ways to actually get it running on commodity hardware. I also believe such projects will either be shut down by Apple, not have enough hardware support to be practical, involve instructions too byzantine to be followed by mere mortals, or a combination of all of the above.

So there. Pirates, you ain't getting MacOS X on your junker. Mac zealots, your precious gene pool isn't being diluted with "Wintel" slime. Douchebags, you will still be able to buy a cool looking computer that you don't really know how to use. I'm even sure that they'll rename the PentiumD they use to the Granite-X, the Cube-4D, or the the Strawberry-Douche using whatever gay ass formula they use to come up with their For-Marketing-Purposes-Only, quasi technical sounding names. Of course, not that the name "Pentium" has meant jack shit in ten years.

A number of years ago one of my company's satellite offices closed down and a deluge of its equipment was dumped at our doorstep. Included in this aggregate of crapola was a little turdy Pentium II Compaq Presario 1655 laptop with a broken floppy drive and a shot-to-shit version of Windows 98 on it. Being the bleeding heart Jane Goodall of the decrepit hardware world, I decided to take it under my wing and nurse it back to health while gaining some experience installing and maintaining Linux on a laptop.

Fastforward to present day, and I'm the Linux/Laptop guru that I am, but the other day I got a project at work that involved getting a Laptop running Linux onto our WEP protected wireless network. I sprang into action and learned how to set it all up pretty quickly and was quite satisfied with the results.

Now, armed with the knowledge before me, it was time for me to grab the old Compaq laptop and tackle an even more Herculean project: The Wireless Turd. Actually, after a much needed Linux reinstall on the laptop, getting it onto the wireless network wasn't really all that painful. The real issue was getting it on the network without audibly emitting static, pops, and buzzes out of the laptop speakers every time it would transmit or receive any wireless traffic, and after a little research I found the culprit. Apparently laptops produced before (or before the popularity of) wireless networking failed to shield their PCMCIA slots from wireless devices emitting signals into the chassis of the laptop itself, my turd being one of said laptops. Things like this usually wouldn't bother me, but this shit was loud.

So, what did I do? I shielded the motherfucker myself with aluminum foil.

Not pictured is me electrical taping all seams and the few spots where the paper ripped up and exposed the aluminum foil. I also added another little strip in the exposed gap seen in the second to last picture (the gap you can see the card through).

An unexpected but pleasant side effect was that the full width heat sink was no longer resting directly on top of the PCMCIA housing which previously was heating up my cards so much that it actually fried an ethernet card I had in there once. An unexpected but decidedly unpleasant side effect from this may be that the paper insulation catches on fire and burns down my entire house. The jury is still out on that one.

It seems to work on and off. When it does happen to make noise, it's very, very faint so I'd consider it a success. Maybe I'll go back in later and shield the actual speaker wires to squelch the remaining signal leakage from getting in.

This is now depricated. Please use the DateTime class for all your PHP date/time needs.

I've consistently had a problem with date validation/formatting in PHP on Linux for as long as I can remember. The root of this problem is a little thing called the Unix Epoch. Basically, the way "time" is perceived on a POSIX (aka unix-like) operating system is not as a "time" as you would see on a digital clock, but instead as a running number counting the seconds since the birth of Unix, which is rounded to Midnight on the morning of January 1st, 1970, known as the Unix Epoch. The number is called a unix timestamp. For example, the current time of this writing, 03-03-2005 02:17:35, is viewed as :

1219629635

Well, validating a time in PHP under Linux has always been as simple as transforming a text date, such as "12/23/1986", into a unix timestamp with the function call:

strtotime("12/23/1986");

A problem arises when you try to validate a date prior to the Unix epoch. Seeing as time doesn't seem to exist to PHP before the Unix epoch, it is impossible to glean a unix timestamp from it, and this function returns "-1", signifying that it isn't a valid date. This is utter horseshit.

The only ways around this I have read are 1) some distros of Linux magically return a workable negative timestamp when given a date prior to the epoch and 2) using some code to just pump it to MySQL, which has actual date verification for it's date fields, seeing if MySQL accepts it, and returning it from MySQL in a formatted fashion.

Neither of these are options for me because a) I'll be damned if I'm going to be tied to a specific distro for this one purpose, and b) I'll be double-damned if I'm going to be tied to a database for this one purpose.

So, what does a guy with these strict principles and a fetish for writing bloated, algorithmic code do? Why of course, he writes his own brute force date validator in PHP and shares it with the world.

Here's a quick code example of how it works:

As you can see, it's pretty straight forward, it checks for improperly formatted dates, dates with with days that don't exist in the month given, leap years, and other oddities like non-numeric characters. You can test the date and pull the formatted date in the most probable format (ie, dates like "01/03/04" could be translated into any number of valid dates, but it's probably January 3rd, 2004).

There may be some bugs, there's definitely room for improvement and optimization, and I'd like to add the ability to pull a timestamp for the given date (and negative timestamp for dates prior to the epoch). Anyway, without further ado, here's the GPL'ed PHP DateValidator v1.0:

Click here to download the PHP DateValidator v1.0 (2.7kb)