19 Sep 2002
I ordered a 802.11b access point (D-Link DWL-900ap) and pc card (USR 2410) with money I got for my birthday. They arrived today, one day before the UPS tracker said they would. I opened the boxes, plugged in the AP to ethernet and power, popped the pc card in, beep beep, linux recongnized the card, got an ip address and it just worked. Very cool. Possibly the easiest hardware install I’ve had in years.
I went out on to the porch and tried using bing, a bandwidth testing tool to see what the transfer rate was and boom no more link. Looking at the access point showed the WLAN light lit soldly (it was blinking before). Unplug the AP, plug it back in… same thing. I monkied with it for a while and then called Tech support. After a few minutes on the phone (it which they wanted to know a lot of details about my network, “what kind of router do you have?”) they said “send it back”. Grrr!
So the question is: Did bing kill it? or was the hardware defective? Quite odd. Not sure if I’ll run bing when I get the replacement.
Also no luck on getting kismet running with the pc card.
19 Sep 2002
Zeke and Jessie came over the mountain this Saturday as part of my wife’s evil plan to surprise me for my birthday. Zeke was poking thru my comic collection and started looking at Transmetropolitian. He then stopped dead in his tracks and read the first trade paperback. I think he liked it. He borrowed the rest of what I have (if someone can buy me issues 46-60 I’d love you forever) and they are now spreading around Harrisonburg to all of his friends.
So I started poking around finding other stuff by Warren Ellis, the writer/owner of TransMet and found some other stuff by him. I found one comic online: SuperIdol, you need to know what a meme is. Here’s the best definition I found on the first page of search results on google (from this page):
meme: (pron. ‘meem’) A contagious idea that replicates like a virus, passed on from mind to mind. Memes function the same way genes and viruses do, propagating through communication networks and face-to-face contact between people. The root of the word “memetics,” a field of study which postulates that the meme is the basic unit of cultural evolution. Examples of memes include melodies, icons, fashion statements and phrases.
19 Sep 2002
Tonite, my prefered browser isn’t working to well. Galeon is crashing when I switch windows. Quite odd as it work before and the only thing I can think of that I changed is the window manager (gnome/sawfish to icewm).
In the mean time I’m reading stuff via Dillo which works amazingly well for being 300kb in size.
15 Sep 2002
Today /. had a story about certain colleges telling their students that “file sharing” is not allowed over campus networks. So how does these rules apply to Mnet? Part of the design of Mnet is that you can’t say any one node is responsible for a file. You don’t “share” a file on Mnet, you just let the Mnet software manage part of your hard drive. Little bits and pieces of a file could be on your hard drive, but you’d never know, you can’t look, it’s encrypted. The idea is that as long two people can pass encrypted messages back and forth, then Mnet could survive. It would be intresting have Mnet run over ICQ especially with ICQ/TLS or AIM. I imagine there would be some problems getting students not to use IM software.
15 Sep 2002
So with a laptop for editing from bed, my new project is to write a little each day about what happened.
Today Laura and I woke up to rain outside our window. We talked about moving to the new house (First weekend in Oct. if you want to come help :), and how nice it would be to have rain in the morning there. We had breakfast on the porch. We went to work on our projects of the day, me doing some work on the release of Mnet (version 0.5.1 is out the door), Laura working on the Ivy Nursery’s website. While I was off in computerlane she also packed some boxes of stuff in the closets. Later I finished addressing one of the last batches of Thank you notes from our wedding (I’ve managed to drag them out beyond the year you are alloted by society to finish them, so if I go to prison you know why)