Mostly Harmless

Wifi.

I’ve had the same old Linksys WRT54G router for years and it’s always been good to me. Recently I’ve noticed a bit of a problem though. I have several wireless devices, including several laptops, a Wii, and various wifi USB cards. They’ve all connected to the router fine. However, when my wife’s laptop is sending a lot of upload traffic over wireless (say, uploading pictures to Picasa or, now, doing a full backup to our local server), then my laptop drops off the network and can’t connect until her traffic is complete.

I have 4 current clients on the wireless network, and looking at my DHCP logs, my wife’s computer (broadcom b43) is uploading things just fine, and my mythtv box seems happy (zydas zd1211b), but both my laptop (atheros ath5k) and the wii (unknown) appear to be struggling to reconnect while her computer is generating soo much upload traffic. All computers run Ubuntu Hardy or Intrepid.

So, is it common for other computers to drop off the network if one wireless client is sending a lot of traffic? Why would I not have seen this before? I tried looking at the router’s QoS options but there really aren’t any for wireless devices. Options?

Posted by john under linux | Comments (2)

150,000 Miles

I’m not a car guy, and outside of oil changes, I don’t do much to my cars.

My family always bought GM cars growing up, and you inherit your family’s prejudices. My first car was the family’s old 1982 Chevy Chevette, It showed me that you don’t need much in a car to get a lot out of it. It also taught me to value and take care of an older car.

My next car was a 1994 Chevy Cavalier that I bought used with 30K on it. I tortured that car, driving it for 5 years all over the northeast US, going to college in northern NY, moving to MA, all the while driving down to see family in MD. The transmission starting acting up around 99K, as well as other problem, so I decided it might be time to move on.

I decided to buy a new 2002 Saturn SL2, even when most of my friends were laughing at me for buying domestic. It was the last year of the original Saturn. Today, my car turned 150K on my way home from work, and it’s had very few problems. Other than routine maintenance, I’ve spent less than $2500 total on repairs for this car. Not only that, it’s been paid off for years. Hell, I learned to drive stick on this car and it’s still on the original clutch. It’s been a good, cheap, reliable car, that still gets good gas mileage even though the engine isn’t quite as powerful as it was when it was new.

I’m not trying to deny that domestic cars have suffered in quality, in fact my wife and I just bought her a 2009 Carolla (after a bad experience with a used Hyundai Accent we bought 2 years ago). She has a bias for Toyota and Honda, and at under $16K, it was a good deal too.. that’s the problem with some domestic cars, when you can get a Carolla/Civic/Camry/Accord for that cheap, it’s hard not to get one. But I do believe there are some real diamonds in the rough, and if you haven’t considered a domestic car recently, you’re doing yourself a disservice if you don’t at least look. And my friends? The only one I know of with a car as long as I’ve had mine bought a cheap Ford pickup.

With 150K, and the fact I commute 80 miles a day on the DC capitol beltway, I’ve started to wonder exactly how much more I can expect out of this car. I face the choice of taking on another monthly payment, or keep driving this car into the ground. If I find a good deal on a new Chevy Cobalt, say around $12K, I might just be tempted.

I have no idea what I’ll do, but no matter what happens, I’m happy with my Saturn.

Posted by john under General | Comments (1)

Projects.

Just a short note talking about the various things I’m splitting my time doing when I’m not a) doing work, or b) enjoying my family life.

• fprint support for the AuthenTec 2810 fingerprint reader. Every few days I’ll boot my computer into windows and try capturing the USB logs for the fingerprint reader. So far, this hasn’t gone anywhere because the USB snooper I could use for windows (usb-snoopy) doesn’t appear to work with WDM drivers.. or, at least this driver. No real progress on this, though i did manage to bluescreen windows a few times.
• Ubuntu support for debian-live. After my last post, I’ve been poking around the debian live-helper scripts to try and reenable ubuntu support. For some reason even what I did before isn’t working anymore. I’m also debating whether I should try and make live-initramfs work with Ubuntu, or stay with casper and just add support to live-helper. Some progress, but will need more work.
• Non computer related, I’m tracing a bit of my family’s genealogy. I’m using the open source GRAMPS program, which is mostly working, although I had to hand modify the ubuntu installed package to remove gtkspell support again because it always stalls while trying to load it. A very odd error. I’ve got a lot of leads from talking to various family members. It could be a lot of fun.
• Final Fantasy quest. Every now and then I pick a game series and try and play through it from start to finish. Since Katy and I are starting to think about little ones soon, my tiny ‘OMG I must do XXXX before I really grow up and have kids!’ thing was deciding to play through every final fantasy game starting from 1 and ending with 12. (Final Fantasy 11 doesn’t count, I refuse to pay a monthly fee to play a game, I just don’t have that much time).So.. I already have 7 and 8 for the PC, I got the PS1 version of 9 that I hope my PS2 Slim can play (haven’t tried). I already have 10 and 12 for the PS2. And for my birthday I went out and bought a Nintendo DS, and used copies of FF 1&2, Dawn of Souls for the GBA, FF3 for the DS, and FF6 for the GBA. I’m waiting for FF4 for the DS to come down in price, and FF5 for the GBA wasn’t available at my gamestop. So far, I’ve played and beaten 1 and 2, and I’m in the middle of three.

  The one unexpected hazard I’ve run into is that I also bought Brain Age, and my wife has taken such a liking to playing BA and it’s sudoku on the DS that it’s been hard fighting for time on the DS. I find this wildly amusing.

So, between work which keeps me very very busy, real life, and all these little projects, I think I’m set with free time for a while.

Posted by john under linux | Comments (1)

T400

A few months ago both my personal laptops broke. My Compaq v3000z (only a little over a year old) had a power socket that went trippy, and my fallback old reliable iBook G3 900 finally gave up the ghost. But I didn’t have the money for a new laptop (and I was annoyed that my HP went soo soon), so I went without a personal laptop for a while, which meant lugging my 15″ work MacBook Pro home all the time. Not a bad laptop, but I like to work late into the night, and the MBP gets scalding hot and the fan turns on at the drop of the hat (or a compile of anything longer then a few seconds). The heat and noise made it annoying to use in the same room as my sleeping wife.

So, I scrounged up enough money to treat myself to a new laptop. I didn’t want a mac given my experience with the MBP (even though I loved my 12″ iBook), and I wanted something that was going to LAST, i.e., something that wasn’t a consumer level HP notebook. I also wanted an AMD processor because I do virtualization work and SVM is -soo- much nicer than Intel’s VT, but that wasn’t really an option outside of HP. I wanted small, cheap, light, and reliable.

So, Lenovo it was, and the fact they released the new T400 just recently made me take the plunge. It arrived this morning. It’s a pretty minimal config: P8400 processor, 2GB ram, 160GB 5400rpm HD, 4cell battery. But I did splurge on the LED 1440×900 display. Here are my impressions so far:

• It’s pretty light weight, only slightly heavier then my old 12″ iBook. Not bad for a 14″ laptop.
• The lack of heat and noise is wonderful. Head and shoulders above the MBP. The bottom gets lukewarm at most, and the fan is barely audible. And this is with running with the ATI 3460 discrete graphics card enabled
• Vista Home Basic is slow. I wasn’t expecting bloatware from Lenovo, but they have a lot of it, and no easy way to install a clean install.

Of course, I spent most of the day getting Linux up and running. I’m now running Intrepid, and it’s running very smoothly. A few things that tripped me up:

• Switchable Graphics: If you leave this option enabled in the BIOS, then linux will see both video cards (the internal Intel card and the discrete ATI 3460HD). This trips up the Intrepid installer, so I couldn’t install Intrepid directly. Interestingly, Hardy worked, although it detected and used the Intel card when I was expecting it to use the ATI one. By setting the BIOS to ‘Discrete only’ and the primary video device to ‘PCI Express’ instead of internal, Linux only sees one video card now.
• ThinkPad Wireless a/b/g III: The actual card is an Atheros AR242x wireless device. This is not supported by the version of MadWifi in Hardy, so it doesn’t work. It may be supported by latest madwifi SVN code if you compile it yourself, I didn’t try. It is, however, supported by the new open source ath5k driver in Intrepid. There’s a catch though. Intrepid ships with both madwifi and ath5k. In my case, madwifi got loaded first, putting the card into a bad state that only a reboot would fix. Blacklisting the madwifi drivers (ath_pci, ath_hal) in /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist and rebooting allows the card to work like a champ. UPDATE 11/2/2008: Ubuntu decided to throw us a curveball right before intrepid was released.  To fix the madwifi/ath5k conflict, they removed the ath5k driver from the default kernel.  This means that you’ll have to install the package linux-backports-modules-intrepid-generic to get the ath5k driver.  You will probably still need to blacklist madwifi as shown above.  This package is supposed to be included on the default install CD.  See the 8.10 release notes for more details.
• ATI Radeon 3460 HD: Intrepid detects the card fine and uses the ATI driver. Interestingly, I tried to use the radeonhd driver, and got a blank screen. I should probably report that. Of course, no 3D, or even 2D acceleration, but ShadowFB acceleration seems plenty fast enough for now. I always have the option of switching to the intel graphics in the BIOS if i need 3D before the R600 folks figure it out. And yes, I could run fglrx too, but I like the fact I think I’m running with a completely open source system.
• Fingerprint Scanner: Not supported under Linux. Mine’s an AuthenTec 2810 USB scanner, and it doesn’t have linux support. Yes, I know fingerprints aren’t very secure, but it’s just cool to use. I’ll see if I can work with the fprint folks to get it working. I just hate USB snooping.
• The Back/Forward keys: This is an annoyance more then anything. Lenovo has an inverted T-style cursor keys on the keyboard (good), that’s slighly dropped down from the level of the spacebar (ok), and they’re narrower than the other keys (ok), but unstead of leaving a blank spacer around in the upper left and upper right of the inverted T, they added two new buttons. A ‘Page Forward’ and ‘Page Back’ button (bad, very very bad). Because the keys are narrower then the other keys, and are dropped half a row lower then the spacebar/bottom row of the rest of the keyboard, I’m often hitting these buttons when I mean to hit the cursor forward/back keys. This is extremely annoying when typing on a web page, because these keys are mapped to forward/back in the browser. You just try typing a long entry into a web form only to look up and see that you hit the back button 50 words ago and you’ve lost everything. I must find a way to disable these keys, or I’ll go insane.

That’s about it, I’m very happy with it. Hopefully this one lasts a lot longer then my HP.

Posted by john under linux | Comments (9)

Comments.

After several posts that get no comments, I stop checking my blag for a few months and suddenly people think I’ve written something interesting.

Sorry for disappearing for a while, work and life have been hectic. Mostly good, but hectic.

I’ve been burned by spam before on blogs, so I can’t not allow unmoderated postings, but I also apparently don’t have email notifications working. Oops. I’ll fix that, and try to be better in the future.

Mea Culpa.

But I’m also glad some people found the LiveCD post useful.

Posted by john under General | Comments (1)