Sunday, January 6, 2008

Is John Daly Good or Bad for Golf?

ever since john Daly hit the major circuits he has been in the news for various reasons. Sometimes for the wrong reasons, based on his personal life.

big john is in the unfortunate position that he is a high profile sporting giant. this means that his private life is privy to all and sundry. With all respect to the media, printed and otherwise, the bad, or should I say sad, side of his life gets a lot of attention. It is utter sensationalism, but that is what sells in the media business.

It seems like john is in the press more for negative reasons, than his skill on the golf courses of the world, which he has more than his fair share of.

He entertains crowds by hitting a golf ball crazy distances, even with his putter. Unlike tiger, the ultimate technician and strategist, john throws caution to the wind by ripping his driver enormous distances, where angels fear to tread. Then he proceeds by displaying unbelievable touch on and around the greens.

john is often seen during coverage to bend over, pick up his cigarette and to walk off into the sunset after his golf ball. Not the image to expose youngsters to. But then, john has never claimed to be the ultimate role model.

The big man is known as the regular party animal, not adverse to consuming large quantities of brewed beverages in relatively short spaces of time. Smoking, drinking and a good measure of domestic uprisings is just a natural part of him.

When you are exposed to the masses the way sporting celebrities are, this type of behavior just does not make for our perception of sporting greats.

Then big Bad john hits the fairways of the world, and guess what? We are still in awe of the man who, I believe, can win anything whenever he wants to.

I watched him during the recent USPGA championship. No, I watched the crowds. They still love him. They still watch in amazement as he goes about his business the only way he knows. Nobody cares about the press and whatever goes wrong in his life. They just want to see john Daly do what john Daly does best and only john Daly can do!

Good or bad for golf? That is debatable. The fact remains he still pulls the crowds and wows them with his brand of golf. Long live john Daly - we need our own characters in golf and you are one of them!

love him or hate him, international golf will be a little duller without him.

Corrie Nel is a golf fanatic and former club captain. Submit your sport articles free:

http://www.sportatlas.com please use ID 1536

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WRT54g Linux Firmware Distributions

HYPERWRT Mission Statement is HyperWRT is a power boost firmware for the Linksys WRT54G and WRT54GS router. The goal of this project is to add a limited set of features to the last Linksys firmware, extending its possibilities but staying close to the official firmware. HYPER-WRT installing this distribution is really a breeze with no head aches. Cool features for this distribution are:

With my old linksys firmware I was unable to VPN into my network. After I installed HYPER-WRT I had no problem. Also, I usually work off my laptop in the same area of my house and with the linksys firmware I had a Good signal according to windows. After I installed HYPER-WRT my windows signal jumped to excellent every time.

installing HYPER-WRT was very easy, I reset my router to factory defaults, downloaded the latest HYPER-WRT firmware, connected to my routers web interface administration tab and pressed firmware upgrade. Then I browsed to the firmware bin files and pressed upgrade.

HYPERWRT turned out to be exactly what its authors intended, an easy to install, power boosting firmware. I would highly recommend using this firmware for any home or business network.

EWRT

EWRT is distributed by Portless Networks. This WRT54G firmware is packed with features meant for creating open wireless hotspots for business or neighborhoods. EWRT has many cool features: Drop bear SSH server (This provides secure access), a writeable jffs2 partition to store your content, great QOS (Quality of service), and NOCAT splash.

NoCat Splash is a captive portal which lets users connected to the wireless network receiving a dynamic IP address but all traffic is redirected to an internal web page. The webpage for EWRT just explains that this router is a wireless hotspot meant for public use and dont abuse it, users must accept the agreement or they wont have access to anything. Youre not stuck using Portless Networks web page because you can modify it for your liking.

QOS for a wireless hotspot is very important for managing how much bandwidth certain services are using. If a few users are hogging bandwidth then others will not have access to the internet thus ruining the hotspot.

Portless Networks intention was to create this router as a Hotspot in a box and they achieved this with flying colors. I was able to install EWRT through the web interface with no problems. I was able to VPN into my home network and used SSH to my Linux box. EWRT has all the latest security features such as wpa and wpa radius. I was able to use TINYPEAP as my radius server.. When I started NOCAT splash and connected to the internet I did receive an error NO data ON THIS PAGE once in a while but that could be my fault some how.

If you want to start a hotspot for your business or create free public nodes in your neighborhood EWRT is for you.

DD-WRT

DD-WRT turns your WRT54G from a cheap $60 router into a $200 dollar wireless router. It has more features then you can count so I will just go over the many highlights. Right now I am using VER. 22, VER 23 is out but I have not installed it yet. VER. 23 is a BETA release. VER 23 has a whole new web interface with many more options that I have listed below. DD-WRT also has options for voip.

Setup Tab Everything is pretty much the same here with the exceptions of VLANS. VLANs can divide your physical LAN into logical LANS. You will want to use this to separate network resources or prevent access to resources.

security Tab One of the best features of DD-WRT is that the VPN option actually works.

Access Restriction TAB All the other firmwares have this option but I am using DD-wrt currently so I will cover them here. If you like to share your wireless connection with others but dont want it abused you will need to set up access policies. You can block file sharing from exact applications like edonkey, you can set times to share your wireless signal, limit certain days and block websites.

application and Gamming Tab- first you have over 30 slots to configure port forwardingthats a lot of different services. Next on this tab is the QOS (Quality of Service), here you can give priority of bandwidth to certain ports and mac address.

Administration Tab If you go all the way to the bottom you will find the option for enabling WDS/connection watch dog. This service will send out ICMP messages / ping commands to your given Access points every few minutes. If the access point you specify cant be reached the router will reboot

In my next article I will be reviewing TINYPEAP, BATBOX and openwrt wrt54g linux firmware distros.

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