I still don’t fully understand just how I managed to get it to work but the simple fact is that by following a half-baked combination of instructions found on this page I managed to get a RaLink RT2400 wireless card working on Ubuntu Linux. These cards can be bought from DSE in NZ.
Next trick is to do the same for my laptop – which is getting Ubuntu Hoary installed on it in the next day or two. I’m going to have another crack at it.
Can’t wait to move into our house!
Edit: Nope, it’s not working now for some reason … 
A deserted beach, stretching for miles. The hills sloping towards the deep green/blue Pacific ocean. The incoming tide fighting with an outgoing river, churning the waters into a boiling froth. Seabirds wheeling over their fortress island, crying out the news to their peers. The sun warming our faces as we lay in tussock covered sand dunes.
It’s so easy for us all to miss what we have in our own back yards. Take a moment to stop and smell the flowers … and I don’t mean that as a metaphor – try it sometime. It’s only until you don’t have it any more that you’ll find yourself missing it.
This weekend Linda and I have worked up a bit of enthusiasm and we’re staying away for a night at Taieri Mouth. We went for a nice long walk today along the beach and then returned via the coastal road. On the way I found myself exclaiming, nay ranting at the amount of rubbish on the side of the road. Once we found a plastic bag each we took the opportunity to pick some up.
I was interested to find out the popularity of beer brands, based on the number of cans we found discarded on the roadside (let’s not even think about drink driving along this windy road!). Here are the results – make of these what you will, they’re certainly not scientific!
Aluminium Cans (ordered by number, then alphabetic)-----------------Tasman Bitter 11Speights 4Ranfurly Draft 3Woodstock Burbon & Cola 2Bruer 1Coke 1Rhieneck 1Southern Draft 1Steinlager 1V (energy drink) 1Victoria Bitter 1
Drink Bottles-------------Coke 4Powerade 2Aqua Shot 1KGB Vodka Cruiser 1H2GO 1Primo Flavoured Milk 1Pump 1Wests 1
The modern world is full of different communication methods – SMS/TXT, phone calls, email, VoIP, web forums, voice mail etc etc. How frustrating is it when you send that email into the ether and not hear anything back? Or when you’re on hold for god knows how long … and no idea how long it will be …
Instant Messages (powered by various Instant Message Clients) however are sublime. The ability to deliver a message to the desktop of someone and know for a fact that it has arrived is great. “Call me”, “it’s done”, “what are you wearing” etc. Brilliant.
IM clients have moved steadily into the corporate environment too where they fill a gap. Their ability to navigate seamlessly through firewalls boost their popularity, but again make for a headache for IT managers. Most IM programs have the ability to transfer files and as such bypass traditional corporate virus scanning (email, web proxy etc).
As a corporate tool an IM client quickly dispenses with that very important audit trail. Many times I have relied on email headers, and the contents of my own “Sent Items” as confirmation of a particular fact. Many times it has saved me – and a couple of times it has put me on the spot. IM clients remove this and make it harder to keep a track of communication.
Careful decisions must be made to correctly implement an IM client in a corporate environment – and care must be taken that a) all relevant information is logged and b) the privacy of individuals – even in their workplace roles – is not compromised.
To this end many companies have created IM clients aimed at the corporate market. As you would expect, Microsoft have been on the bandwagon for a while touting their LCS (live communication server).
Read more here
I’m configuring up a box running Ubuntu linux for my favourite mother-in-law. She’s not a power-user, and so I dismissed the thought instantly when I considered running Linux on the PC. Now that I’ve thought about it more, it will make sense for me to have the experience dealing with resolving issues that crop up.
I will tell you right now – there will be lots. And they’ll be bastard issues.
She wants to be able to print and scan, email and chat, connect, disconnect, write CD’s etc. Perfectly normal operations and it’s certainly not unreasonable to expect these functions from a PC. I’ll be very surprised if these all work “out of the box” without major tinkering. It will be interesting, and the source for more blog material.
On the way to getting things configured, I came across a mention of a VNC server for Linux that can be used to do remote desktop stuff. It’s called “Vino” and it is a remote desktop tool for Gnome. The user (or you before you roll the PC out) runs “vino-preferences” and sets up the connection criteria, and then any old VNC client can be used to connect to the active display while the user is logged on.
You can install vino on Debian based systems with “apt-get install vino”
This will be great for me to be able to sort things out remotely, especially as in 6 weeks time we’ll be moving into our new house which will be about 15 mins drive away from the in-laws.
[ps. If you came to this post looking for a decent source of info on Vino, good luck ... I couldn't find squat either!]
Returning to the topic of babies, here’s a short video of a 19 week scan of “Bug” (our nickname for the foetal soup that is coagulating into what might pass for a goblin, or better yet a human). Before you start scoffing at the cheesy music, it was the only “baby” related music I could find that didn’t involve complicated breakups or drunken promises to “get wit choo” in the alley …
Uncategorized | GuruBob | 
October 24, 2005 10:48 pm | 
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