Replacing my crappy Movistar fiber optic router

Sant Cugat now has 50 megabits fiber connectivity! I’m happy that now my VOIP calls to the US are crystal clear (even with video conferencing), and the kids are happy that we can now download a whole movie in 120 seconds.

The only downside is that Telefonica gives you a really crappy router that connects via ethernet to the fiber optic converter. For some reason it drops connections after some period of time, meaning that my VPN connection never lasted more than a couple minutes.

At first, I though I could replace it with one of my collection of old routers, but unfortunately Telefonica was too clever for this: in order to provide IPTV, VOIP and other services, they require all ethernet packets destined for the Internet to be set with a VLAN Id of 6.

So the right setup is:

PPPOE
username: adslppp@telefonicanetpa
password: adslppp
VLAN id: 6

Unfortunately almost no routers inexpensive routers support VLANs, so I had to buy myself a router. I chose the Netgear 3500L (buy it from Amazon.es), which although it doesn’t support VLANs out of the box, does allow you to install the Tomato firmware, which does.

Once you’ve installed the new firmware, set up the PPPOE connection, but you need to log in via telnet (remember the username is root, not admin) and set the following options (the UI VLAN screen doesn’t work with this router):

nvram set vlan6hwname=et0
nvram set vlan6ports=0t 8
nvram set wan_ifname=vlan6
nvram set wan_ifnameX=vlan6
nvram commit
reboot

And you should be good. The firmware has a lot of other nice features, including parental monitoring, bandwidth allocation, etc. All in all, I’m happy with Tomato.

In case you are wondering, I’ve tried earlier with DD-WRT firmware instead of Tomato, but for some reason it just wouldn’t work for me (it kept resetting the vlan back to 2 every time I rebooted).

Imagine a Spain where everyone is unemployed

Absolutely classic segment at the beginning of Tuesday’s Asuntos Propios:

• A la carta
• > Radio
• > Radio Nacional
• > Asuntos propios
• > Asuntos propios - Primera hora - 04/10/11

Scientific excellence, Spanish style

Something that has always depressed me about Spanish culture is how jealousy prevents any acknowledgement of extraordinary achievements. For example, the Spanish film director Almodovar, has never won the Spanish equivalent of the Oscar, despite being the most internationally known filmmaker from Spain.

So, when the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation established a grant (named after Nobel prize winner Severo Ochoa), for the top research centers in Spain, it wasn’t a huge surprise when the most prestigious research centers in all of Europe (the Center for Genomic Regulation in Barcelona) was not selected.

When confronted about the glaring omission, the research director of the Ministry, Montserrat Torne, defended the decision by saying that (more or less) “The three selection committees were presided over by Nobel prize winners, if we question what the Nobel prize winners have decided, we might as well quit and go home”.

Strangely enough, one of the Nobel prize winners and other committee members were consultants for some of the centers that were chosen.

The thing that I’ve realized is that the quaint American standard of “avoiding the appearance of impropriety” that normally keep judges from making decisions that could be influenced by their personal interest simply does not exist here. (Dick Cheney leading George Bush’s vice-presidential search committee, which picked Dick Cheney after a long and hard search may be an exception)

I noticed this recently at my own company for a selection process, where after various groups going through a huge amount of effort to follow the process, present to the relevant committees, etc, were surprised to find several candidates that had magically made it to the next round that had never even participated in the first round. Naturally, these were pet projects of the people on the selection committee, who said that due to the fact that they knew these projects so well, they were uniquely qualified to judge their merits.

Stereotypes and extra-curricular activities

Our school recently had the parent-teacher meeting about all the different extra-curricular activities that the school offers. The principal first gave his talk and then we all went to our separate groups:

1. Soccer: all the fathers
2. Dance and gymnastics: all the mothers, except the Chinese mothers who went to violin & piano.

Ok, so there were only four Chinese mothers, but after reading Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, I did find it kind of funny.