Several years ago, we replaced our commodity hardware firewall (a Sonicwall SOHO from ’01) with pfSense running on an unused Dell 4100 desktop from that same year.

pfSense was a little confusing to configure the first time through (doing 1-to-1 NAT with virtual IPs and CARP was initially confusing, but the pfSense forums and The Google came to our rescue). Once in place, though, it did a great job. And when I say a great job, I mean that we could pretty much forget about its existence. It just hummed away in the background, and everything worked. When we needed to check up on our ISP, we discovered that quality of service logging was already supported, as well as pretty graphs of various connection properties. Very nice!

Over the last weekend, the 4100 locked up, and our connection was interrupted. Rebooting gave a firmware error about a bad disk in drive A: — but there was no disk in the drive. Power cycling, opening the machine, wiggling some cables, and blowing out some dust brought it back up, and all was well. Except it wasn’t, really. The machine spontaneously rebooted a number times over the next few days, and occasionally got into the “bad disk in drive A:” boot failure, requiring a hard power cycle. As I watched on the console, I saw the kernel fault out after too many memory checksum errors. The old machine was giving up the ghost.

After commissioning another old desktop (an ’07 vintage Dell, this time), I was able to install pfSense on it. I had to disable some of the extraneous hardware in the BIOS, but after about an hour I had it installed, booting, and ready to go. I was able to simple dump the configuration from the old firewall, load it into the new machine, reassign the LAN and WAN interfaces to the proper devices, and swap the boxes out. voila! Back in business!

With any luck, I won’t have to repeat this process for another five years.

I’m accustomed to having a hot-key in my text editor for inserting a time-stamp. Now I have a plain-text note-taking application that I want to use for managing my time, but it has no bells or whistles. It doesn’t allow the creation of macros and it doesn’t have a time-stamp function.

All is not lost! Using Automator, I created a service which calls a shell script to generate a nicely formatted time-stamp. I haven’t found a way to assign the service to a hot-key, but in many text input areas, a contextual services menu can be brought up with a simple right-click of the mouse.

Simple, nice, and convenient.

Here’s how to do it:
Fire up the Automator application. Create a new “Service” workflow:
(click to enlarge)

For the operation, double-click on “Run Shell Script” and set it up as shown in the image below:
(click to enlarge)

You’re done! Now you can insert 2011-08-04 16:58:06 time-stamps 2011-08-04 16:58:13 everywhere 2011-08-04 16:58:20.

Note: this is under Snow Leopard / Mac OS X 10.6.8. It probably will work under anything from Leopard onward.

I’ve had a few requests on Flickr to document what I’ve been using for bug hunting.

Well, here it is. Nikon 105mm f/2.8 macro, 36mm (and/or sometimes 24mm) Kenko extension tube(s), and Nikon R1 close-up flash system. I’ve been shooting mostly hand-held, 1/200 sec at f/10-f/22. I make up for hand shake by taking three or more pictures for each one I even consider keeping.

Using Xcode and Interface Builder is like a bizarre, retro-futuristic dream, where Code Warrior for Palm OS has somehow evolved into the interface for the Great New Empire.

On the date of the last scheduled shuttle launch, I started thinking about return on investment.

NASA’s entire cumulative budget, from 1958 through the present, in dollars (adjusted to 2007 value), has been $843 billion.

Our little adventure in Iraq has cost over $1 trillion.

Which has done more for us as a nation?

Wikipedia page on NASA’s budget
Wikipedia page on Iraq war expenditures.