WiredPen

In our home network, we have an Apple Extreme network configured like this:

• Brother Laser printer - upstairs, ethernet to router
• Windows XP machine - upstairs, ethernet to router
• Hub - downstairs, ethernet to router
• Airport Express - downstairs, ethernet via hub
• Tivo (was ReplayTV ’til its ethernet card died last week) - downstairs, ethernet via hub
• MacMini - upstairs, Airport
• Powerbook - upstairs and downstairs, Airport

The Extreme allocates 192. IP addresses  and the Express 10. IP addresses. A while back, the Mini, which connects to the network via wifi, stopped printing to the Bonjour printer. So did my Powerbook, which also connected wirelessly. But the Windows machine, operating counter to type, worked. So I resorted to the sneaker net USB solution or the “mail it to myself at gmail solution” — converting everything to PDFs, of course.

Tonight — when I really did not have an hour to troubleshoot this — I got the bit in my mouth (so to speak) and I’ve figured out the problem.  The printer gets its IP address from the Extreme. The address will always start 192. because it’s hard-wired to the router; this is why it and the Windows machine are simpatico.  The Mini, on the other hand, has been known to stray to the 10. network (Don’t ask. I don’t know) … as does the Powerbook when I’m working downstairs.

And that, my friends, was the only frigging problem!

I was poking around network settings when I noticed that the Mini had a 10. address. I clicked the “renew lease” button, and the new address was a 192. one. I ran the printer scan, and this time the printer showed as configured and happy. [Earlier tonight, I uninstalled and reinstalled the printer as part of my troubleshooting; the Brother utility wasn't terribly helpful.]

Here’s hoping this little post helps some other poor soul out there!

Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo and TPMCafe has been honored with a George Polk award for legal reporting and his work on the Justice Department firings of US Attorneys. This is an acknowledgment of the importance of the news/political blogosphere and a step towards recognition that the substance of an investigation is more important than the medium through which it is reported.

The Polk Award for Legal Reporting will go to Joshua Micah Marshall, editor and publisher of the widely read political blog, Talking Points Memo. His sites, www.talkingpointsmemo.com and www.tpmMuckraker.com, led the news media in coverage of the politically motivated dismissals of United States attorneys across the country. Noting a similarity between firings in Arkansas and California, Marshall and his staff (with his staff reporter-bloggers Paul Kiel and Justin Rood) connected the dots and found a pattern of federal prosecutors being forced from office for failing to do the Bush Administration’s bidding. Marshall’s tenacious investigative reporting sparked interest by the traditional news media and led to the resignation of Attorney General Alberto Gonzales.
http://tpmmuckraker.talkingpointsmemo.com/us-attorneys/2007/03/

Tip - E&P:
http://www.mediainfo.com/eandp/news/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1003712141

Details of Polk Award:
http://www.brooklyn.liu.edu/polk/press/2007.html

After years of battling in the media format wars, Toshiba officially pulls the plug on HD DVD players. Production will end in March, InfoWeek reports. The sole survivor: Sony’s Blu-Ray. Vindication for losing the Beta/VHS battle?

For the next month, HarperCollins (owned by News Corp., the world’s largest media conglomerate) is providing some books online, for free. You’ll have to read the books online (no downloading or printing). (tip)

This pilot will be used to track sales: “We will know very soon if we sense any kind of cannibalization,” chief executive Jane Friedman told the NYT. Two interesting titles: Mission: Cook! My Life, My Recipes and Making the Impossible Easy by Robert Irvine and The Undecided Voter’s Guide to the Next President: Who the Candidates
Are, Where They Come from and How You Can Choose by Mark Halperin.

The WSJ reports that Random House, the largest English-language publisher, is experimenting with selling book chapters. Random House, owned by the German conglomerate Bertelsmann, is beginning with Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die. The price: $2.99 each.

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Tributes today to XML’s 10th birthday. In 1998, I hadn’t heard of it yet, but by 1999 I was in the midst of it thanks to my (now I see how close he lived to the lunatic fringe!) friend Daniel Koger. In 1999, Daniel felt XML was going to transform business like I thought (in 1996) the web was going to transform politics! Early technology optimists, we both were. Are. Something!

• Tim Bray on 10 years (tip, Dave Winer)
• Five years old (W3C) 
• Five years old (cNet)
• XML Development History (W3C)

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In the increasingly competitive space of groups-of-people-as-gatekeepers, Reuters has added a TwitterThis link to some of its news stories.

Twitter, for the uninitiated, allows members to post “tweets” to a public timeline or their “friends” (real or virtual). Methods of posting: text from phone, the web or a stand-alone application. Because Twitter grew out of a desire to easily post a single text message to a group of people, “tweets” are limited to 140 characters; many bloggers now use the service as a mini-blog or a way to promote “real” blog posts.

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The Khaleej Times reports that there are now five Middle East undersea cable that have been cut. The first, only now reported, was the Flag Telcom FALCON cable on 23 January, one week before the latest round. (tip)

Here they are:

• SeaMeWe-4 (South East Asia-Middle East-Western Europe-4) near Penang, Malaysia (nd)
• FLAG near the Dubai coast (1 Feb)
• FLAG Europe-Asia near Alexandria, Egypt (30 Jan)
• SeaMeWe-4, near Alexandria, Egypt (30 Jan)
• Flag FALCON near Bandar Abbas in Iran and (23 Jan)

Mahesh Jaishanker, executive director, Business Development and Marketing, du, said, “The submarine cable cuts in FLAG Europe-Asia cable 8.3km away from Alexandria, Egypt and SeaMeWe-4 affected at least 60 million users in India, 12 million in Pakistan, six million in Egypt and 4.7 million in Saudi Arabia.”

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The BBC has an excellent graphic of the undersea cables that provide telecom and internet connectivity around the world. A ship has begun repairs on one cable cut last week. No new word on whether the fourth cable was cut or simply hosed due to a power issue (the semi-official line).

The IHT reports that “[u]ndersea cables carry about 95 percent of the world’s telephone and Internet traffic.” Compared to satellite transmissions, information traveling over undersea cable costs less and travels faster.

We’re now getting confirmation that this outage — four cables, three days — is an anomaly. “Flag Telecom has never had two cables down at the same time in the region,” the IHT reports. I’m still looking for data on how often undersea cables have been cut.

Update: more (with cool maps) from Jesse Robbins at O’Reilly Radar

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From Yahoo! News: AT&T has a green light to buy 60 percent of the 12MHz spectrum, part of the 700MHz spectrum band that “carries wireless signals three to four times farther than some higher spectrum bands.” In October, the announced terms of sale were US$2.5 billion. The purchase “covers 196 million of the 303 million U.S. residents and includes 72 of the top 100 media markets in the country.” This is separate from the FCC auction in progress. FCC Commissioner Michael Copps voted no.

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There are now four undersea cables out-of-service in the same general area of the Middle East (outage exceptions: Israel and Iraq) — all disabled in a three-day period last week. (tip) The cable bundle is only an inch in diameter (about the size of the average adult human thumb) — a mere speck on the ocean floor. (The fibre optics need power — up to 10,000 volts DC — so a power wire is bundled with four optical cables that, combined, are about the diameter of pencil lead.) Read the rest of this entry »