SWAT's blog

It has been a long time since I have posted something on here and it has a good reason. Somehow my Apache doesn’t like the CGI my blog software uses and decided to spit out “Error 500″ messages most of the time. The solution would be to make my blog static html, well no problem there, except that I would lose my ability to get comments. So I’ve made two small additions and one change to my blog:

• Added:A comment ‘plugin’ which enables comments while the blog is in static mode. It only has some standard Perl dependencies, so it should be able to run everywhere where Perl is installed.
• Added: A create-a-blog-entry page which is also written in Perl and has some standard Perl dependencies. It’s quite nasty, since it enables anyone to write blog entries. I have secured it a little bit by putting a username and password as a MD5 hash in the file and added a list of allowed IP’s.
• Changed: The blog was changed from dynamic (CGI) mode to static mode.

Note: This entry was written with the create-a-blog-entry page

I wanted to request the membership a couple of months ago, but I had too little spare time left. Finally I saw it on my big todo list and thought: hey, it’s now or never. So today (5th of April 2007) I join the ranks of the official Ubuntu members. The big smile on my face says it all: I’m happy to be an official Ubuntu member.

There are some items I wanted to purchase for my laptop for quite some time now, and last week I finally ordered them. “What are they?” might some of you think, well, here’s the very small list.

3Com 3CRXJK10075 PCMCIA WLAN NIC, which is just plug and play with Edgy. Because of the Atheros chipset inside, it uses Madwifi. Unfortunately, because of some problem with Madwifi, I can’t use this card to connect to any AP’s. (I already filed a bug report) But that was not the reason for me to buy this card. The reason was that this card supports hostapd and monitoring mode

My second new toy was a Haicom HI-204III-USB GPS mouse, which also works great with my Edgy laptop. I tested it very quickly with gpsd and it worked perfectly. So now I’ll be able to track my movements when I’m on the road in my car, but what if my laptop battery dies?

For that purpose I found a Belkin 300W (12V -> 230V converter) very useful. Since a laptop doesn’t use much power (especially mine), this would not put a strain on my car battery. Now I can use and recharge my laptop (and cellphone etc.) on the road, finally no more begging for power

These purchases were actually pretty overdue, so I am glad that I made them. Hopefully I will be well enough soon to use these items and put them to the test. I always wanted to map the AP’s in my village and see how secure they actually are.

Just yesterday I realized that life is so much better when you have time. Then you can plan ahead and prepare yourself for the things to come, which I wasn’t able to for quite some time now. Yesterday I noticed that I had some ’spare’ time, which was really rare, but I had to make use of it. Since I have a LAN-party next week, I had to prepare my computer again since I’m not using Windows. So I started installing Dawn of War, Winter Assault and Dark Crusade on a Windows computer, zipped it all up and copied it over to my Ubuntu computer. Now I only need to find the time to get the game working on my computer, but luckily I have read reports of other Cedega users which have the games in question working. Even with something this small, you immediately notice that having time is a great thing.

This weekend I was at a birthday party of a friend of mine. Sometime in the middle of the night Snake (a friend) got behind the computer. Ow dear, I shivered of the possible things that could come. Luckily it were only a few very funny movies he found on LiveVideo.com. Why tequile makes you feel better, How to… (tequila) and finally a secret fridge with Bud beer

A good friend of mine, ellessar, asked me to come by his new place and hook up his internet connection. He tried himself (and called the helpdesk, which didn’t support Linksys…), but that didn’t work, so he called in the cavalry. When I arrived I started with checking the default settings, which were OK. After that I checked the cable connection which was also fine. Since this kind of ‘error’ usually is ‘user error’ I tried checking the DNS etc. (since I couldn’t use the internet, but had an IP). Nothing worked. It was saturday, after work hours, so we couldn’t call the helpdesk. I jotted down some notes, and told him to call the helpdesk the next week.

After a few days I talked to him on MSN, what… he had internet! I asked him what happened. He told me, he called the helpdesk and they tried to ship him off (for about the 3rd time) with the standard line “It’s your router, check your configuration”. He replied with the notes I jotted down and then the guy on the other got really quiet. “I’m going to ask a colleague, please hold” was the reply and he had to wait. When he returned he was told that he got a “bad IP” and that it would be fixed soon. A few days later ellessar finally got his internet back.

Currently I’m totally swamped with work, as usual. Somehow I can’t find time to rest, and I mean really rest. Luckily the “Christmas-vacation” came along, which gave me some time to recharge my empty batteries. It’s becoming usual to work hard and fill up all of your free time and just work towards your vacation. When it’s vacation, it’s finally time to relax (and still work a little bit) and recharge your batteries, which are probably very low.

Somehow I have dozends of projects on hold or on ice and as soon as I have a little spare time left, those projects pop up again. You keep yourself occupied and hopefully make a nice buck out of it too.

Vorige week begonnen de keuzevakken Linux en OpenSource, waar ik aan deelneem. Vorige week vond het eerste college OpenSource plaats, waar ikzelf een korte introductie heb gegeven met betrekking tot Linux. Vandaag vond het tweede college plaats en het was zeer interessant, alhoewel het college ruim 3 uur in beslag nam.

Er passeerden allerlei zaken de revue, waaronder: Stallman, Torvalds, Raymond, Linux (ook Ubuntu), allerlei OpenSource projecten, communities, licenties, GNU, peer-to-peer review, crowdsourcing, lopende OpenSource projecten en meer. Het is een van de weinige vakken waar ik veel meepraat en die ook echt interessant zijn. Helaas is dit een keuzevak, dit zou eigenlijk in de vakkenpakket verwerkt moeten worden.

Het was een heerlijke niet-slaapverwekkende vrijdagochtend (P.S. ik moest ook het internet ‘fixxen’ aangezien alles hier MAC restricted is. Dus even een MAC adres geleend en ingetikt in de terminal van de MAC)