Entries from March 2004 ↓

I’m in the home stretch of my thesis, almost done with the main chunk of code. There will be plenty of work left in the weeks to come and I still have to write the paper, but i’m feeling pretty good. It’s odd I was burned out on this a few weeks ago but it’s coming back and I’m actually starting to enjoy it again.

Here is some filler for blog content
Audible.com is offering complete audio tracks of the 9/11 hearing for free. I commend them.

Here is a quick howto on setting up your orinoco card to work with kismet.
Normally you need to patch pcmcia-cs however with gentoo it is already patched. Sweet.

Now you just need to patch your orinoco drivers with the appropriate version of the patch found at http://airsnort.shmoo.com/orinocoinfo.html. You can find the version of your orinoco driver by looking at the header of orinoco.c found in /usr/src/linux-2.4.22-gentoo-r4/drivers/net/wireless/. I am running orinoco-0.13d. If you are running a different version just make the appropriate changes below.

Now download the patch to that directory and run:
patch -p1

You know I like my thinkpad a lot now that I have a decent battery and wireless on it. The only thing that absolutly enrages me is the placement of the esc key. It’s directly above my F1 key. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve hit it by accident while working in vi and launched the gnome help browser. Feh.

So I just did a du -csh on my thesis Project directory. 86 megs. EW.

So I’ve wanted to get wireless working on my work laptop because I work nights a lot and I have been planning on getting rid of my Mac so it would be nice to have a laptop that I can use in different places. I bought a linksys that was supposed to work but the tricked me. They changed the chipset and didn’t change the model number, they just stuck a v4 on the end in little type. It didn’t work.

I went back and returned it. Best Buy doesn’t have a wide selection really I could choose between a Linksys, D-Link, or Microsoft. I was leaning towards the D-Link but Buzzco told me to try the Microsoft instead. He doesn’t have a great record with wireless cards but I went with it anyway. Turned out to be a good call, it uses the orinoco drivers found in the Linux Kernel and setup was relatively painless. So here we go:

Using a Microsoft MN-520 under linux
cardctl ident

Socket 0:
product info: “Microsoft”, “Wireless Notebook Adapter MN-520″, “”, “1.0.3″
manfid: 0×02d2, 0×0001
function: 6 (network)

—————————
build the following modules
—————————

Network device support
Wireless LAN (non-hamradio)
Hermes chipset 802.11b support (Orinoco/Prism2/Symbol)
Hermes in PLX9052 based PCI adaptor support
Hermes PCMCIA card support

—————————
/etc/pcmcia/config
—————————

device “orinoco_cs”
class “network” module “hermes”, “orinoco”, “orinoco_cs”

card “Microsoft Wireless Notebook Adapter MN-520 1.0.3″
version “Microsoft”, “Wireless Notebook Adapter MN-520″, “”, “1.0.3″
bind “orinoco_cs”

/etc/init.d/pcmcia restart

iwconfig

dhcpcd eth1

edit /etc/conf.d/net
add iface_eth1=”dhcp”

cp /etc/init.d/net.eth0 /etc/init.d/net.eth1

i needed to edit my resolv.conf to get dns working

So I guessed the QOTD would go for 4 rounds. I was wrong, Myself, Mike, and Figgy posted questions and got some answers. It was passed on to Flapjack and he answered the question but I don’t think he got the premise. So the QOTD stands dead at three.

So now how about a bunch of links.

- Mario Clouds: all I can say is read it. This guy hacked a Super Mario Bros. cartridge to only display clouds.
- Best Weblog: This is one of the best weblogs I have ever read. This post in particular is really cool.
- Written by the guy above :LOAF is a simple extension to email that lets you append your entire address book to outgoing mail message without compromising your privacy. Correspondents can use this information to prioritize their mail, and learn more about their social networks. (Thesis topic for someone???)
- Lego Bible Lesson: The old testament told with legos. I find his uses for the little red bricks disturbing.
- NASA is so cool: although the headline of this article is terrifing it’s not that bad yet. Also quite interesting.

It’s almost do or die time on thesis. Crap.

Whoa, this worked better than I thought it would considering the laziness of you guys, the power outage, and spring break. Ok so we’re at four and unless flapjack drops the ball it might continue for a bit. I agree with bryan though, perhaps this should be question of the day that starts with ‘T’, QotDTSWT… yeah that looks confusing enough…

What was the first computer you ever used?

The first computer I ever used (thank god I’m not as old as bryan) was an Apple ][c. That’s right apple afficianados, that machine was an apple 2e only ‘compact’ hence the c. It only had one internal 5.25 inch disk drive so formatting or copying disks was a pain in the ass. Put one in watch the drive grind away while it loaded 32k or so into RAM. Switch disks, watch it grind out a write. Repeat 7 or 8 times. Remember those things that let you punch a little square out of the corner of a floppy to make it double sided? Anyway it was a decent machine, it was 1986 or so (yeah my folks couldn’t afford a mac at the time) but it got me started. It has a color monitor which was nice and we had an Imagewriter II the king of workhouse line printers. Remember “THINKING…PRINTING…” etc? I had a few games, Where in the world is Carmen Sandiago being the best of them. My neighbor had a IIgs which was an amazing machine, but I guess that is a different story.

ps. I refuse to answer kyle’s question till later. Thesis…

Waking up at 8am on wednesday to discover that your water doesn’t work for the fourth time in 2.5 months. Let me tell you that just primes you for a great day of installing z/VM and meetings. Now that I’m home and the water is coming out brown I can’t wait to work on my thesis. Stupid crappy day.

So as many of you know my car has been demolished. I’ll find out later today if my car is actually totalled or if geico will try to fix it. I’ll also be getting photos of the destruction today. So that should be fun.

For those that don’t know I was rear ended by an old Ford Bronco. This send my little golf crashing into the Taurus in front of me, then the Bronco hit me a second time. I had a bunch of x-rays and I’ll find out if I’m screwed up in a day or two. Until then I’m on a ton of painkillers and stuff.

Ford: 2
Volkswagen:0

Ok, so I wanted to continue thesis work on my desktop because the screen is larger and the keyboard is friendlier to my wrists. Problem is I’m running debian and it’s not the most java friendly linux distro I’ve ever used. I did get in running a lot easier than I thought though. Here is what I did.

Get the goods

I got the IBM SDK at http://www-106.ibm.com/developerworks/java/jdk/linux140/ on the right hand navigation box is the download link. Fill out their giant form and then download IBMJava2-SDK-141.tgz.

Next get IDEA at http://www.jetbrains.com/idea/ if you havn’t purchased it yet get the 30 day trial license while you’re there.

Set up ibm’s java

Unpack your SDK in /opt, if you choose to install in another directory make sure you reflect that in the environmental variable. In your .bash_profile add the following lines, if you want all users to have access to java then place these lines in /etc/profile.

export JAVA_HOME=/opt/IBMJava2-141
export PATH=$PATH:$JAVA_HOME/bin:$JAVA_HOME/jre/bin
export CLASSPATH=$CLASSPATH:$JAVA_HOME/lib

source .bash_profile for the changes to take effect.

Install IDEA as normal

Just run the installer as normal. I set all the project folders to be in my home directory and I set the install directory to be in /opt. When it asks for your JDK just point it at your JAVA_HOME.

Dats it.