Oct 2003

Sun, 19 Oct 2003

Pope Beatifies Mother Teresa

I'm not catholic, so I guess I can get away with this, but it appears that CBS news thinks that the pope beautified Mother Teresa. Here it is. And journalists are trying to convince me that my blog needs an editor to make mistakes like this?

Posted at: 09:55 | permalink

Sat, 18 Oct 2003

Linuxant DriverLoader for Broadcom 802.11g Works With Emachines M5310 and Fedora Kernel 2.4.22-1.2088.nptl (Athlon)

Well, after a little work (which I suspected yesterday) I was able to get the linuxant driver loader to work on my EMachines M5310 running Fedora and the latestkernel. Linuxant is to be credited for their RPM install and webconfig, which are among the best I've seen anywhere.

I determined that my Linux and Kernel version were unsupported and so thoughtfully, Linuxant provides an RPM download of their driver. When I rpmed it, I was told I needed kernel source. I then did "yum install kernel-source" and let yum take care of the details. Once that was complete, I proceeded to rpm -ivh on the linuxant rpm and indeed it built the driver as part of the RPM install. When it finished, it told me to go to port 18020 on my localhost with my browser. Once there, I was prompted to login as root, then stepped through a series of configuration questions wizard-style.

The toughest part is finding the proper INF and SYS files from the windows drivers. These are not on the driver CD-ROMs provided by emachines. Sigh. I found them on the Windows partition under C:\Program Files\WLAN\PCI. I copied those to a network share, rebooted and then copied them into my linux partition, went to 18020 webconfig again, and went through the install just fine. I was afraid that linuxant's license was going to be a nightmare but they connect right through from the driver config and since I hadn't disabled my trusty orinoco, I had the required internet access. Once the license was installed and the MAC address interrogated, the driver was configured.

I then proceeded to Redhat's System Settings/Network utility and indeed, the linuxant driverloader had appeared as eth2 under the hardware tab. I added an eth2 for it and this is where I ran into a problem. which was a couple messages about bad parameters when I tried to activate the new eth2. I found a note on the internet about the bad parameters, which appeared to be related to the ESSID. So I set the ESSID manually and it worked! I'm assuming that's a bug with my particular setup, but it was a minor workaround and it's a joy to not have to worry abou the damn orinoco card sticking out the side of the machine anymore.

I've started a bunch of massive ISO downloads just to stress the thing while I'm out this afternoon but I remain hopeful. Assuming it works reliably, it's definitely worth whatever small price linuxant asks for it after the trial period is up.

Posted at: 13:48 | permalink

Fri, 17 Oct 2003

Broadcom 802.11g Wireless Drivers For Linux

Well, miracle of miracles I see a message come across the emachines laptop group on Yahoo this morning mentioning that Linuxant has a linux driver of sorts for the Broadcom 802.11g chipset that's built into my Emachines M5310 laptop. This has been the one major sticking point in running linux on this machine, although I've managed to limp along with the reliable orinoco 802.11b card in the meantime. So, these folks have some sort of architecture whereby they're wrapping the windows driver and allowing linux to speak to it, throught it, something like that. I'm not sure that I understand it fully. Anyhow, I mailed the support folks at linuxant as per their instructions and asked them whether they support the variant of the broadcom chipset that appears in this machine which lspci identifies as BCM94306 rev 02. I'm gonna wait till I hear from them before proceeding with the install as it could be a bit of work that I don't want to waste if it's hopeless. But there is hope, which was better than the situation previously where it seemed that Broadcom would never release a linux driver.

Posted at: 16:15 | permalink

Sun, 12 Oct 2003

Pat Metheny Trio at Manchester Craftsmen's Guild

So the wife and I managed to see Pat Metheny Trio at Manchester Craftsmen's Guild this afternoon. The current trio consists of Pat on guitars, Christian McBride on bass, and Antonio Sanchez on drums.

The show started with Metheny solo on the stage playing selections from his solo album for baritone guitar. He covered the baritone, as well as the nylon string and pikasso 42-string guitar. The sound and performance were superb. My favorite part of this segment was when he covered a medley of Metheny favorites on the nylong string including portions of Minuano and First Circle.

About halfway through the show, Pat was joined by the other members of the trio, and they went through some of Metheny's more traditional material and standards, stretching from Freddy Freeloader to Lone Jack.

At one point Christian McBride soloed on the upright bass with the bow which was just amazing - a highlight of the show resulting in thunderous applause.

Lone Jack in particular, was cookin' beyond any reasonable speed bordering on the ridiculous, reminiscent of some of the Jack Dejohnette stuff from years ago. This tune really showed Antonio Sanchez' considerable prowess on the drumkit.

As always Metheny continues to grow and impress us beyond any imaginable ticket price. I can't wait to see what he's got up his sleeve with the next PMG album.

Posted at: 22:36 | permalink

Wed, 08 Oct 2003

How do you browse?

I got to thinking about my use of the browser today. I was running ephiphany on linux and I thought how nice it was that they had removed all the cruft. And then I saw the go button after the address bar and I thought, "Has anyone ever clicked the go button in the history of the web?"

Posted at: 16:28 | permalink

Fri, 03 Oct 2003

Opthamological Bliss

I went to the eye doctor today to get my eyes examined. I had been having some difficulty reading small print, and though I don't have corrective lenses for that condition, I was afraid that I might require bifocals. I was relieved when the doctor told me that indeed, my prescription was too strong and proved to me that when I removed my glasses, I could actually read book print better. This was a pleasant surprise. The largest surprise though came when she said that she couldn't tell that I was diabetic from looking at my retina, which is saying something considering that I've had diabetes for almost 30 years, and that eye doctors have remarked previously that they could tell I was diabetic from studying my retina. It's fairly typical to see small retinal hemorrhages in diabetic eyes. I was also thrilled to find that I could get rimless eyeglasses with magnetic clip-ons now. What will they think of next?

Posted at: 19:11 | permalink

Wed, 01 Oct 2003

Dunlop D220's And The SV650 Inspection

So, I went and had the bike inspected today. It needed an inspection and tires. Put Dunlop D220's on front and back. They're pretty slick, quite literally. I should heed all the warnings about the first 100 miles. When I pulled out of the dealership, I turned right and twisted the throttle pretty hard to get up to speed in traffic, and indeed, the back end slipped so I looked like one of those lunatics on the ice track for a split second. No worries.

Posted at: 20:57 | permalink