zen.org Communal Weblog

My laptop, a Fujitsu Lifebook P-2046, has a built-in wireless ethernet card. It’s only 802.11b, which is slower than most these days at 10Mbit/sec. It works fine, but I see E using her iBook at 54Mbit/sec and can’t believe how fast things appear on her screen. (Part of this is because her Web browser doesn’t go thru a proxy, while mine uses privoxy to weed out the crap, but it’s still noticably faster.)

I got a Netgear WG511 card, but it doesn’t work out-of-the-box with SuSE 9.2 and its 2.6.8 Linux kernel. I followed the steps with SuSE’s YaST2 program to configure the card so everything ended up being put into the file /etc/sysconfig/network/ifcfg-wlan-bus-pci-0000:01:00.0. (Even though it’s showing up as eth1, not a wlan* device.) Trying to activate the card failed. A little Google-digging, and I found the answer: use a driver from www.prism54.org. No luck, the server seemed to be down for days.

The Web server over at prism54.org finally came back up, so I was able to download the newer driver for the card to make it actually work. Part of making the prism54 driver work includes setting up a firmware update, which was made available for easy download to be installed in /usr/lib/hotplug/firmware as the file isl3890. I did also have to make one tweak so the ‘make modules‘ command would work.

The combination worked like a charm. Now it’s zooming away happy as can be. 🙂

One catch: like most other PCMCIA cards for this laptop, they suck the battery dry like a purist enjoying his pint during a heated conversation in a pub. On the road, the internal one has far less impact on the battery, but within proximity to a power source the WG511 card helps convince you there’s no need to upgrade the laptop just yet.

Besides, the next generation of the Lifebook is using Intel’s chip instead of Transmeta’s, which is a real shame. For the religious, the next step is the Actius MP30 from Sharp. With their ongoing work with Sharp, I wonder if Transmeta’s going to do a chip similar to the ARM so the successor to my Sharp C860 described recently could grow to use a Transmeta chip instead? The basics of its Code Morphing software seem to me to imply the ability to emulate any architecture, not just the x86. So why not shoot for a chip that’s buried inside an awful lot of stuff these days?

I had been trying to use the Internet Wizard for setting up my D-Link DCF-650W wireless CF card, but everything was still in Japanese. Even working my way thru that, all I saw was WEP for 40-bit(64-bit) key, not a 104-bit(128-bit) one. This morning, instead of choosing Wizard in Settings->Network, I just did ‘Add’. A tabbed window of configuration bits appeared, all in English. Voila, on the WEP tab is a Key Type entry that includes both key sizes.

This post is being made using the SL-C860. Wahoo! I was able to use the CF card from our camera and copy a photo from it onto the Zaurus, which then used scp to bring the file over onto our Web server. (Had to Edit->Copy the image, then change the folder up to the Image Folder in the internal flash memory.)

I found that ssh works fine for root,but tried as the default ‘zaurus’ user you get the error

debug: Waiting for server public key.
Disconnecting: Bad packet length 1349676916.

A post talks about ssh protocol 1 vs 2 being a possible cause, but editing /etc/ssh/ssh_config for that didn’t seem to make a difference. Of course once I found that root worked fine, I put off more digging for now.

The NetFront Web browser it uses doesn’t display the WordPress weblog content properly. I don’t know yet if it’s due to what’s being emitted by WordPress or if it’s the fault of the browser.

Oh, and Patrick quickly moved on from playing with the drawing program to learning the inner workings of the C860.

E gave me the coolest gadget ever for my birthday: the Sharp Zaurus SL-C860. It’s only sold in Japan, which means it comes by default with everything only in Japanese. A company in the US has a business going for selling them in the US with 97% of the content converted to English after bringing them over from Japan. Unfortunately, my C860 was shipped without the required change being made.

Today I finally got the file used to do the conversion, but they didn’t include any instructions. Gahh. I asked for the details via email, but while I was waiting I decided to see if my original Sharp Zaurus SL-5500, bought with my buddy Doug a few years ago on a visit to California, could help out. Yup, got the SL-5500 going again (its fatal flaw is that if the battery dies, you lose everything you did since the factory copy booted) and was able to copy the file over onto the SDRAM card. Pop out the card, pop it into the new SL-C860.

But what to do with it? I was able to look at the Backup/Restore program on the old Zaurus, and find the program on the C860 that looked the same (even if all characters were in Japanese). That was enough to go through the steps to make it restore this image from the company, which did all of the work.

Next game is getting the CF cards for either wireless or wired networking to work. That’s okay, this was the impossible part (I sure hope). 🙂

As 余艾蕾, Zoë and I are going to be spending most of Christmas Eve and day at my parents house we opened our presents after our Solstice Day dinner. Zoë got a LEGO® QUATRO™ Bucket, 余艾蕾 got a coffee grinder, and I got a Bose® Companion® 3 Multimedia Speaker System.

I plug my Bose® Companion® 3 Multimedia Speaker System in to my computer and start playing some Christmas tunes. The Wynton Marsalis Quintet playing “We Three Kings of Orient Are” sounded great, Dave Edmunds playing “Run Run Rudolph” was way cool. Then the woofer kicked in with Run D.M.C. doing there “Christmas In Hollis.” Wow! Maybe I need to get more Hip Hop songs.

I haven’t done full time web development since I worked for Wired magazine in the 1990s, but both at jobs and at home I’ve been doing it here and there since. A little PHP here, a little Perl there. A little MySQL here, a littel PostgreSQL there. A little Apache here, a little Boa there.

The other week I discovered a new arnonym: “LAMP.” I’ve seen references to LAMP developement before but I guess I’m just so out of it I had no idea what it meant. I snuffed it off as some proprietary alternative to, um, well, LAMP. In case you are like me, it means: Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP. I found one place that says the “P” stands for PHP/Perl/Python. I’ve been doing this for years! I must be too engrossed in my work or something.

余艾蕾 and I put together what we like to call Zoe Type, a glut/GL program that I was seeking for my Junior Hacker, Zoë. Well, something like it. I put the source up.

A recent InformationWeek article titled “Don’t Take The Name ‘Laptop’ Literally” is best described by reading the tag for the story:

Years after laptops became a required tool of business, we learn the heat they generate can make men infertile if they put them on their laps.

Now if companies like Transmeta start to market their low-power low-heat processor chips using this sort of information, they’ll definitely be able to tap an untouched (heh…) market.

This evening I was finally able to sit down and hack a little more on jPodder, Christophe Bouhier’s cool Java podcast client, now at version 0.7.2. With little tweaks it’s able to run under Linux enough so I can try fiddling with things and see where bugs appear. And most of the wrinkles are smoothed out to compile the .java files down to Java bytecodes without platform dependencies (sounds weird, doesn’t it?). Cool!

In the beginning we had SATA cards that didn’t have working Linux drivers; I got different cards and all was well. Well, all was not well, to close the case we needed SATA cables with 90° jacks. We ordered eight Belkin cables for testing and again all was well.

So we ordered like twenty-two more cards for the rest of the cluster, and ninty-six more cables with 90° jacks on the end. Some where on back order, but a bunch came in and all was working. The the backorder cables started comming in, it seem Belkin changed the 90° jack, and the new ends are bigger. That extra quarter centimeter suddenly makes it so the cables really don’t fit any more! Well, they probably could squeeze in, but I think it would break something.

This all started in the beginning of June! Computers suck.

Maybe I’ve uninstalled Sarge from systems but I’m slowly getting them back. I’m up to eight systmes with Sarge, twenty-four mixed Debian Woody/Sarge systmes. I can actually do upgrades without worrying about breaking things! Well, Sarge is still testing, so there is a chance of breaking things.

A few weeks ago I was asked to install kgpg on one of these mixed systmes (actually another mixed system apart from the thirty-two systems above, but that’s another story) and all of KDE got upgraded at the same time, so did Samba. A week later I was told to downgrade Samba because the new one was broken. To downgrade Samba I had to remove kgpg and downgrade KDE. I got lucky because the next work day Debian put out a new version of Samba that worked.