It's Wednesday and that makes it Hydrapinion day for me. this week I look at the consequences of sharing so much of ourselves, online, all the time.

When you post something online - are you thinking about what it says about you to the potential audience?

Stop by for a read.

Another Wednesday and it's time for another instalment at my Socialise column at Hydrapinion. This week, I take a quick look at Twitter and ask whether it actually matters.

Many people trivialise Twitter's importance and suiggest that its death is iminent. Twitter is important TODAY. Will it remain so into the future? That's anyone's guess. Twitter, whether we like it or not, has become a part of the world's information sharing landscape.

Stop by for a look.

We don't often think about routers as being computers but they actually are. They have memory, processors and run an operating system. That operating system typically takes that comes into one port (usually the port labelled as "WAN") and routes to the other, numbered ports. All of this requires some smarts so that the traffic comes and goes between the correct LAN ports. That's what the router software manages.

Router software does a bunch of other stuff like manage communications standards, provide a firewall, keep all your wireless traffic protected by implementing encryption and a whole bunch of other stuff.

The Problem

My LAN is not the usual home setup with a single router. As you'd know from the story of how I built my office I require two routers so that both the house and office have wired and wireless LAN access.

The first Linksys WRT310N has been running in the house for some time. It's connected to the cable modem and has worked flawlessly. I reviewed this unit for APC a while ago and I reckon it's a great router.

Until recently, I'd been using a Belkin N1 Vision. It's been OK but I find that it loses wireless connectivity from time to time. Also, I found that some of my shared devices, like my Thecus NAS became invisible unless I restarted the N1 Vision. I've updated the firmware but every week or so the router needed to be restarted. Incidentally, the reason I stuck with the N1 Vision was that it was super easy to use as a second router. It had a single checkbox that converted it from a router to an access point.

When setting up a LAN with two routers you can do one of two things; run each router as a seperate LAN or create one LAN that uses both devices. If you run them as two LANs it makes the job of sharing resources like printers and files far trickier. A single LAN is usually easier to use but you need to make sure that either you have only one DHCP server (a DHCP server gives each device on the LAN it's own unique address), set up both routers to use DHCP but with non-overlapping address ranges or use manual addressing for each device on the LAN (not impossible but a pain to maintain).

I decided that I wanted to use my original WRT310N as a true router, doing DHCP, and the second router configured to just act as an access point, with no intelligence.

The problem was that short of a bunch of complex manual configuration the second WRT310N couldn't be set up as a simple access point. That's what lead me to DD-WRT.

The Solution

My buddy Wayne is a full on Linux user and loves using open source solutions whenever he can find them. He put me on to DD-WRT some time ago.

According to the DD-WRT wiki:

DD-WRT is a third party developed firmware released under the terms of the GPL for many ieee802.11a/b/g/h/n wireless routers based on a Broadcom or Atheros chip reference design.

Installation was dead simple. All I needed to do was download the firmware and then use the default Linksys firmware to update the router's firmware with DD-WRT. There's a compatibility list so you can check if your router can be given the DD-WRT treatment. The whole process took just a few minutes.

What you find is that the DD-WRT does everything that the original Linksys firmware does. However, it adds a a whole bunch of other options.

For example, making the WRT310N into a simple access point and disabling its routing capability only required that I set a couple options. In my case I simply set the Internet connection to "Disabled" (I know that's counterintuitive but it works), give the router a new IP address (so that it's not the same as the main router), disable the DHCP server and then set the WAN port to take the incoming connection from the main router.

A full list of all DD-WRT's features can be found here.

Once all that was set, I restarted the router (following the instructions) and tested basic connectivity. I was able to connect to the Internet and see resources on my LAN. I then set up wireless with WPA2 and my preferred SSID so that wireless was secured. Another restart and I confirmed that all was working perfectly.

Conclusions

Ultimately, my decision to look at alternate firmware for the WRT310N was driven by the lack of a specific function in my router - a simple way to make the router into an access point. Many people tend to equate free software with poor quality.

DD-WRT is a great example of open source software and how free doesn't have to equal junk. DD-WRT takes a great product, the Linksys WRT310N, and expands its functionality significantly.

It's Wednesday - time for another Socialise column over at Hydrapinion. This week, I look at the 'friendship" in our connected world.

...connections, or "friendships" as many services call them, have become a scorecard - a way to promote our own self-obsession by making sure everyone knows how many people are our friends.

You'll find the full story at Hydrapinion.

Back in February, Microsoft announced that its latest handheld OS, Windows Mobile 6.5, would be appearing devices later this year. I was given an exclusive hands on first look at this latest portable OS to come from Redmond by Rick Anderson, a mobile solution specialist from Microsoft Australia.

On the face of it, Windows Mobile 6.5 is more evolutionary than revolutionary. The guts of the OS haven't changed much with the development effort firmly focussed on improving the entire user experience.

One of the criticisms leveled at Windows Mobile, particularly since the release of the iPhone, is that getting things done was a two-handed operation; one to hold the device and the other to hunt and peck with a stylus. In response, Microsoft has made many of the menus and buttons substantially larger. As a result, many operations can be completed singlehandedly.

In one of the more creative moves, Windows Mobile 6.5 eschews the typical grid arrangement we're all used to with screens of icons. Instead, icons are arranged in a honeycomb pattern with larger "active zones" for each icon. As a result, it's almost impossible for even the most sausage-fingered user to accidentally hit the icon adjacent to the target. While this means there are fewer icons on the screen, scrolling up and down doesn't use scroll bars with iPhone-like finger flicks used for moving around.

Working with Melbourne company, Point UI (www.pointui.com), Microsoft is working with carrier and OEM partners to create customised interfaces. As you'd expect, carriers are rapt as access to their premium services is made very easy for customers. However, the introduction of widgets, small applets that run on the Today screen, offers both opportunities for developers and great productivity boosts.

For example, we saw a widget that brought a consolidated inbox, for SMS, email and other messaging services, to an easy to access module. Using a finger swipe to the left or right flicked us through different installed widgets. Like Palm, Android and Apple, Microsoft is jumping on the application store bandwagon with MarketPlace - a place to buy new programs and widgets directly from your handheld.

One of the weakest points of previous iterations of Windows Mobile was web browsing. Simply put, Pocket Internet Explorer was rubbish. Microsoft is putting that aside and now delivers a full version of Internet Explorer 6 althoughbthye're dubbing it Interent Explorer Mobile. We really liked the way it was easy to zoom in and out of sections of a page with reasonably complex rendering by simply double tapping the region we wanted to focus on.

In the past, Microsoft has confused its market by offering multiple versions of the Windows Mobile. For Windows Mobile 6 there will be one version called Windows Phone. If only the boffins in Redmond will do the same with their desktop OS.

As far as performance goes, we were looking at Windows Mobile 6.5 on a HTC Touch Pro. Performance wasn't great but as we were looking at beta code on hardware that wasn't optimised for the OS we wouldn't worry terribly. By the time devices are brought to market we'd expect to see far snappier response times.

In an official sense, Windows Mobile 6.5 has been released as it's in the hands of licensed OEMs. However, it's up to individual manufacturers to implement it. Some may choose to offer it as an update to existing Windows Mobile 6.1 devices while others may hold it back, making it available only on brand new hardware.

Given the evolving nature of language and the increasing popularity of Twitter I've invented a new word.

Twitastinating: the act of using Twitter to avoid doing real work

Remember folks, you heard it here first - Twitastinating

I've been reviewing on of those desktop replacement, super-large notebooks. The make and model aren't important but what is of importance is what I learned today about Blu-Ray and some of the issues around its implementation.

I tested three different movies out and only one actually worked. The first movie, Don't Mess With the Zohan, caused the system to complain about the drive's region setting. What made this infuriating was that the movie was encoded as multi-region and so should play on just about any drive.

My second movie, Quantum of Solace, wouldn't play either. The playback software told me that I needed to update the drive's firmware as the disk had features that were unsupported. What's that about? Watching a movie is an unsupported feature? That has to be the most ludicrous things I've ever seen.

The third movie, Blade Runner, played just fine.

Watching a movie shouldn't be this difficult.

In the March 09 issue of PC Update, I've got a story on the latest version of iMovie. Released as part of the iLife 09 suite at this year's Macworld Expo, it rights many of the wrongs wrought by Apple when it abandoned the orignal iMovie codebase.

Even the most ardent Apple fanboi couldn't deny the colossal mis-step Apple made with iMovie 08. In one fell swoop, Apple took a brilliant and simple consumer video editing application, iMovie 06, and removed almost all the decent functionality and replaced it with an application that was so woefully inadequate that Apple had to make the old version available to those who upgraded too hastily. That was 18 months ago and iMovie 09 seeks to repair the damage.

The full story can be read here.

In this week's Green Guide, the tech and entertainment supplement in Melbourne's best newspaper, The Age, I take a look at the Lenovo W700ds - the world's first dual-screen notebook.

I don;t see the W700ds as a laptop. Rather, it's a portable desktop system. What do you think?

It's not often that there are two big netbook announcements in one day. After all, the whole netbook/mini-notebook phenomenon is a pretty new trend and, Apple's CEO Steve Jobs says, the market is still nascent.

However, Asus today announced its new $1300AUD Eee PC 1004DN. What makes this Eee PC different from the others? Well, it's the first to market with an optical drive which, in my mind, further blurs the line between netbooks and sub-notebooks. The first netbook, in my view, was the Toshiba Libretto that was around in the late 1990s. The rest of the Eee PC 1004DN spec sheet reads similarly to most other 10" units although allow casing over the LCD and Express Card slot give it a slick look and plenty of flexibility.

The other big news came in parts. Firstly, I received a press release from Microsoft announcing that they'd been selected for the roll-out of "mini-laptops" into schools in New South Wales. This is part of initiative to get a computer into the hands of another 200,000 teachers and students. The release pre-empted one that came later from Lenovo. Lenovo completed the story, telling the world that they'll be supplying 220,000 IdeaPad S10e as part of Digital Education Revolution program.

So, not a bad day for the netbook market. A new model that's probably more a notebook than a netbook and Lenovo scores a huge sale (with Microsoft coming along for the ride).

Last week at Hydrapinion I wrote about Livewire. I take another look this week as I've learned a bit more about the project and would like to clean up some of my misconceptions and errors.

Please pop over to Hydrapinionfor a look.

My Bible study group has spent the last few weeks looking at the book of Esther. It's a fascinating story about how a young Jewish girl becomes the queen of Babylon in what amounts to a beauty contest. Without delving into all the details and recounting every element of the studies and discussion I wanted to take a quick look at one of the tangents we discussed this morning - the fate of the Amalekites.

In the book ot Exodus, chapter 17 tells us that:

The Amalekites came and attacked the Israelites at Rephidim. Moses said to Joshua, "Choose some of our men and go out to fight the Amalekites. Tomorrow I will stand on top of the hill with the staff of God in my hands."

So Joshua fought the Amalekites as Moses had ordered, and Moses, Aaron and Hur went to the top of the hill. 11 As long as Moses held up his hands, the Israelites were winning, but whenever he lowered his hands, the Amalekites were winning. 12 When Moses' hands grew tired, they took a stone and put it under him and he sat on it. Aaron and Hur held his hands up—one on one side, one on the other—so that his hands remained steady till sunset. 13 So Joshua overcame the Amalekite army with the sword.

Several hundred years later, we learn a little more about the Amalekites and, in particular, their King Agag. From 1 Samuel 15:

When Saul attacked the Amalekites all the way from Havilah to Shur, to the east of Egypt. He took Agag king of the Amalekites alive, and all his people he totally destroyed with the sword. But Saul and the army spared Agag and the best of the sheep and cattle, the fat calves and lambs—everything that was good. These they were unwilling to destroy completely, but everything that was despised and weak they totally destroyed.

Deuteronomy 20 describes the rules of warfare and tells the Hebrews that they are to "annihilate them" and to not let anything that breathes remain alive". It's very strong stuff. However, we know that Saul spares King Agag.

In the story of Esther, the main protagonist is a guy called Haman. Haman has a vendetta gainst the Jews and, as it turns out, is a direct descendent of King Agag (see Esther 9: 24). It's taken over 1000 years for the ultimate destruction of the Amalekites to complete as it's through the intervention of God in the story of Esther that the last of Amalekites, Haman and his ten sons, are destroyed.

All of this tells me that I have a long way to go in my study of the Bible. It's pretty incredible to find threads like this and, in my view, lends support to the veracity of the Bible as a historically accurate text. But that's an argument for another day.