Wireless on Linux

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 ... :(

Taken for granted

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.

Labour Weekend

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  11
Speights  4
Ranfurly Draft  3
Woodstock Burbon & Cola 2
Bruer   1
Coke   1
Rhieneck  1
Southern Draft  1
Steinlager  1
V (energy drink) 1
Victoria Bitter  1

Drink Bottles
-------------
Coke   4
Powerade  2
Aqua Shot  1
KGB Vodka Cruiser 1
H2GO   1
Primo Flavoured Milk 1
Pump   1
Wests   1

Instant Messages

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

vino-server : remote desktop sharing for linux

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!]

Second Scan

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 ...

The House

Due to popular demand, here's a link to the property! It will probably die soon though when they take it off the web site.

http://www.rwdunedin.co.nz/show?rd=1&ref=DUN11477

Home Sa-weet Home

Confirmed! We've got ourselves a house. We move in at the end of next month, woohoo!

Up the creek with a paddle

Several times lately I have come to post to my blog, got to the editing bit and then for whatever reason I've clicked a link elsewhere and not bothered to come back. I'm sure there's a technical term for this but I'm buggered if I can a) invent it right here or b) be bothered to go googling for it :)

This weekend has been a great weekend - nothing in particular happened, it has just been good. It started on Saturday with a re-visit to a house that we're interested in buying to double check some of the things there to ensure that it wasn't going to slide down the hill or fall down in a week's time. My initial impressions were reaffirmed and we'll be putting an offer in tomorrow.

This was followed by some ten pin bowling where I played a crap game, followed by a 156 pointer. I started out pretty bad but then got 4 strikes in a row at the end which was the icing on the cake. Otago won the rugby too - not that I care - but it helped toward the "good vibe weekend buzz" feeling.

We then went out for a birthday party for a friend of Linda's mum where I got nicely sozzled and won $6 on the pokies. I'm very conservative but my first ever high-risk high-return 5 credits per line, 20 lines yielded a surprising windfall.

Today I woke to find that I'd lost an hour of sleep due to daylight savings (yay, lighter evenings!). We then wandered down to Taieri Mouth where my Dad was going to take the boat up the river to test the new bow rail. Now why you need to take the boat for a spin just to check a rail is beyond me but I didn't complain. It's all (NZ) breathtaking!

So anyway (and here we come to the title of this post) we got a wee way up the river and the boat conked out. We had to wave down another boat who graciously towed us back to the launch ramp. When we got back it seemed that much to Dad's embarrasment many people he knew were there with smiles on their faces. After some diagnostics, Dad realised that he didn't unscrew the air-vent on the petrol tank and the fuel couldn't get through. Oops! Oh well, next time will be a blast!

Since it's been so long since my last blog, there's a few things I want to rant/rave about:

Technorati
My friend Brett just got back from WE05, and one of the people who presented there was from Technorati. Technorati is "... a real-time search engine that keeps track of what is going on in the blogosphere — the world of weblogs" (full details here).

Basically the deal is that each blog entry can be tagged with certain key words, and then any blog entries with these keywords throughout the blogging world can be collected into one place. This allows me to do blog searches for things like my local area (Dunedin, Otago etc.) and consume them using my favourite RSS reader, FeedDemon.

In short, it's a great way to scan the "blogosphere" for stuff you're interested in. Thumbs up to the Technorati crew!

Robot Chicken
Adult Comedy. Cartoon. What more can I say? Robot Chicken is a show put together by Matthew Senreich and Seth Green. Each show is 10 minutes long and full of stop-motion animation, usually involving bizarre decapitions of smurfs, fart jokes and over-the-top blooper reel shows. Absolute freakin' big phat thumbs up!

Wireless
I'm *FINALLY* on my wireless connection! Woohoo, what more can I say? Thanks very much "John Smith" (name withheld to protect the guilty), it's very nice :)

Petrol
Petrol looks like it's not going up any more - for now at least. I'm getting sick of hearing people on the radio whining about how it's so expensive and there's so much tax on it and can't the government do something to give us a break? Apart from the GST on petrol (effectively a tax on a tax since the government already takes a tax on each litre), I'm all for petrol being expensive. If nothing else I hope it will make those soccer moms driving their kids to school in rangerovers hurt in the pocket.

We all have a social responsibility to use the limited energy resources that we have efficiently. I fully accept that for some people they can't avoid having to drive to work and home again every day, but I'm sure that lots of people could do things like take the bus. Oh that reminds me - while I'm at this point in my rant - what kind of schedule do Dunedin busses run on? Looks like a pretty bad one to me. Anyway - if more people take the bus then the bus company will have to adjust their service, make it more efficient etc. I'm severly supressing a huge rant here, I'll let it out some other time.

So in short, I'd be pleased to see petrol go up to $2.00 per litre as was forecastin July this year. Bring it on, it will hopefully help people to understand and appreciate alterative forms of transport.

Well, that's me for now. I've got more to say but will save it for later :)