Blimp Week For a Day!

Newer readers may have noted an occasional tendency on my part to blog upon topics associated with lighter than air aviation. The faithful correspondent and expert medievalist behind Hollyism dropped some blimpy science upon me this morning:

“I saw Dynalifter, which is apparently two guys in a “plastic-sheeted hut” with an expensive 150-foot prototype. The ship’s big idea is to combine airfoil lifting surfaces with an LTA central hull. The story notes that the principals do not have an aeronautics background and met while working in the IT department of Mount Union College. The operation’s website includes decent pictures of the prototype, which is a full-fledged beam-and-girder dirigible.

That, my friends, is living the dream. Airship flights daily from Lake Union to Mount Rainier, in season!

No surprise, really

Longtime Mac-lover David Pogue hates on the new Treo 700W in the NYT. The new Treo uses Windows Mobile (I think) as the underlying OS, and interestingly, reverts to the lower screen resolution of the earlier model, the 600.

Etherised

The airport is now properly configured, and I can get back to the usual business of monkeyfacing over appearing and diappearing network printers and the like. What a relief!

Aeroport

Finally got the router configured to support my fixed IP block, huzzah! But for some reason, the Airport only allows clients to gain full-qualified IP services if the client has one of the five fixed IPs – locally assigned DHCP clients, from the Airport’s own DCHP server, appear to gain the appropriate 10.foo.bar.baz number, but can’t see any webbiness or even ping the router – the DHCP LAN is walled off from the fixed IP LAN.

I think this may be due to the fixed IPs requiring a subnet mask of 255.255.255.248 while the DHCP is handing out a mask of 255.255.255.0. I don’t know if it’s possible to configure the Airport’s SNM for DHCP. Hm. Time to hit the boards.