Lately, I was able to get my hands on a used/refurbished WZR-1750DHP. Amazon marketplace had it in virtually new condition for under $90. 512MB of memory and dual core SoC made me think that it could be worth it. 

The original Buffalo firmware, while nice, was a major PITA straight from the 90s; almost any config change required a reboot. Turns out that Buffalo has WZR-1750DHPD, which essentially is the same thing with a nicely done DD-WRT firmware. It turns out that it's relatively easy to flash the Buffalo-supported DD-WRT firmware onto WZR-1750DHP. 

After loading Buffalo-supported version, the router turns into a far superior device than almost anything I had before. The only con is lack of the external antennas for extended range.

Some thoughts on coding in Python

I've been working on improving my Central Quarantine extractor script lately. One of the snags I hit was a stupid bug in zipfile module in Python 2.x-3.4.

It has to do with archive names not matching between two different places. When such mismatch occurs zipfile simply raises an exception and refuses to extract the files.

This mismatch thing is actually a feature in Zip format that allows the files to be effortlessly renamed without any need to re-pack the various files stored inside the ZIP file.

Since I was making sure that my code runs fine on both Python 2.7.6 and 3.4 the only point of contention was the bastardized zipfile module. The one from 2.7.6 would error out with Python 3.4 and the one from 3.4 would do the same whe running on 2.7.6...  I've added a conditional importing, but I've not tested it with other versions of Python...

After jumping through the hoops to ensure that my code runs properly on Python 3.4, I feel much better now that it also works perfectly well with 2.7.6.