delx.au / blog

In my house I have Debian Linux running on an old laptop acting as my router with a Netgear WNDR3700 acting as an access point (WAN port on this is unused). The AP is configured with WPA2 security, but recently I wanted to connect my Nintendo DS to the wifi network. Now the Netgear has guest networks, which is pretty much what I wanted, but it only allows the guest wifi access to the WAN port, which was useless to me. I also wanted to be able to conveniently enable and disable the insecure network with a button on the access point. Knowing that the hardware supported what I wanted to do, and having had good experiences with OpenWRT on another router in the past, I set out to see if I could make it work.

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At work recently I was writing some code that needs to parse very large input files consisting of decimal numbers. These need to be converted to binary. My first attempt at doing this with boost::lexical_cast() was laughably slow, so I did some experiments to see how fast I could get it.

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