f-log

My recovered laptop has wifi in PCMCIA form, but Ubuntu was not finding it ...
dmesg
Nothing, the hardware is not being claimed by any drivers.
lspcmcia
Hmmm, there is something there but is quoted as [no driver]
pccardctl info
Ooo, amongst other things is PRODID_2="3CRWE62092A Wireless LAN PC Card"
Just double check nothing is working with this.
ifconfig -a
nope
iwconfig
nope
googling the 3CRWE62092A string got me http://www.xs4all.nl/~bvermeul/swallow/ but it would not build.
I even tried fixing the MANY errors, but after a few days I found the kernel changelog had VASTLY updated the PCMCIA interface code and this was a lost cause :(
One thing I had noticed was the chipset name poldhu and quick google of this got me http://sourceforge.net/projects/poldhu/ which was being updated regularly and built and installed first time no problem !

make
sudo make install
sudo modprobe poldhu_cs
ifconfig *blah*
iwconfig *blah*
dhclient

connected !

http://www.gimp.org/ has some wonderful tools if you look hard enough.
In just 2-5 mins I created each one of these




The process is very easy;
:Create a new image of the size of your desktop i.e. 1024x768
:select a foreground and background colour.
:Use the gradient fill tool to fill the entire page.
:Repeat step two but select new colours
:goto /filters/render/nature/flame
:use the Edit and Camera options to make adjustments click on OK wait 20seconds to a couple of minutes and save your new background.
If you look closely at my backgrounds you can see I did use some minor edits to enhance the image but the options are limitless.
Gentoo users gallery
Windows users can use the windows version of GIMP to achieve the same results.

Last Wednesday it was VERY cold Brrrrr and after walking the train station to find all the trains canceled I came home to find this in the garden.

They were on an upturned plastic table that as you can see had a set of 'cells' were iced formed. I have never seen this before.
Explained by New Scientist

After an interesting Thieving Secret Santa at work that lost me a USB rocket launcher I quizzed the guy who bought it to find Woolworth were selling them for just £9.99 !
I could not find any but asking the person behind the counter got me one from the stores.
The box was cellotaped badly, but all the bits were in there and that is how the other one was presented at work.
Plugged it in to Linux after hear bad things about its windows software, ran dmesg and got the manufacture and model numbers as 1941:8021 googled those and got to http://www.fatal.se/fulhack/ahmissile/ a quick ./configure make make install ahmissile brought up a basic window with eight directions, clicked on one and it worked !
After moving around all over the place I tried the fire, a strange mechanical noise ran for 3-4 seconds then POP! the little lady(these missile are of the female variety) shot off.
Great fun and the author is really friendly, always a plus.
Just think for £100 I could get another ten !!

gur bgure grnz vf purngvat

krum has been out of sight and out of mind recently, but I will turn back to its sweet siren song soon ...

The lug Xmas part night was slightly low on numbers, but there were just enough for five L0Z3rs(the losers) and five Lamers(the winners).
After the last pub quiz I decided to 'up' the fun factor(though some noted I also 'upped' the evil and bizzare factors).
There was my usual random of random opensource/linux themed questions (I promise to write them up soon) ranging from RMS and Linus's middle names to hack outlook passwords, through RSI recovery and a revisit to a couple of old favorites from the last quiz.
There was also programming in swears, the lack of identification of the essential filelight, decoding secret messages, matching O'Reilly titles to covers, drawing tux in an extremely short time frame and other silliness.
I had hoped to write a new score board system but never had the time :(
We missed out the mime round due to time constraints, but overall everyone had a good time and there was lots of food and some (slightly) better prizes this year.
The only two questions remain, how do you mime "firefox" and did David actually make a more accurate guess on the lug meeting place latitude/longitude ?
Final scores were 33 - 31, with may mad collection of guess the closest number rounds to hand out the individual presents. My spam quota got vastly under estimated , guesses were between 1-20 , whereas the answer was 230 (spam not captured by spam assassin for that day).
OK, one more question, how am I going to top this quiz for next year ?
Maybe I just need to build a flashier score board and recycle the questions :)

Alain Robert aka spiderman made an appearance at Portland house this morning.
We noticed him doing warm up exercises three floors up on the roof connecting to our building, before he disappeared around to the front face of the building and started climbing its remaining twenty+ stories completely unaided.
He took just under 40mins with plenty of rest stops so he could;
take a phone call
drink coffee (from a office worker inside)
powder his hands (did this for every story reached)
pose for photographers
and wave to the crowed
Apparently he was doing the climb to raise awareness of global warming, but we could not read his shirt.
For his trouble he was arrested for criminal damage and wasting police time.
The police spent most of the time pushing the crowd further and further back incase "the wind carried his body", which suited us fine as it was a good excuse for being unable to get back in the office.
wikipedia article on Alain Robert.

The blog train was stationed in "Linux pub quiz valley", but then got stuck at "Escalating family illnesses junction" with guaranteed zero sleep.
The overnight express now offers "up-to" three hours per night, but at least the train is moving.

Sarah finally gave back my laptop from 8 years ago but it has XP on it so...
backup windows data, defrag, insert ubuntu 7.10 desktop CD, reboot select default option wait ages get a black screen with coloured strips down either side.CTRL+ALT+F1 and get console, CTRL+ALT+F7 and get ubuntu desktop.
As I did not need anything else I started the install, seemed quite slow but then it was running 'live' off the CD. Got to the disk partitioning section and got a message "starting the partitioner" then nothing. The CD was thrashing so left a short while before switching to console CTRL+ALT+F1, this switch took about 20 seconds. Then I tried to run dmesg but the keyboard echo was at least 20 seconds per hit. Eventually dmesg ran and I could see all sorts of SQUASHFS errors.
At this point I could not even CTRL+ALT+DEL so I pulled the power, then I booted up again this time I choose the VGA boot option thinking I might have a better experience. Not quite, I got black and green stripes of ascii characters and switching to console and back did not fix it.
Hmmm, maybe I am missing something, so I google around for a while and determine that laptops often have problems with power management so after booting up and selecting the CD defect check and after it reported none, I edited the command line to have acpi=off and noapic. Well it booted into the desktop without issue but this time I had a sniff around what ubuntu could see of my windows disk, all seemed fine so I tried the install from the desktop again, this time I did not even get to select my keyboard layout before the CD was screaming and the machine became completely unresponsive...
Time to try something new, I burnt a copy of the alternate install ubuntu 7.10 disk and ran that, this time everything is in a console window and after about an hour of answering yes to all the questions I had ubuntu installed dual booting with windows.