Not That Easy - WiFi Woes, Part Two

Turns out I was too optimistic. wicd and the little adjusting I did does not deliver a working Internet, not every time. Today, no matter how I tried, I couldn't connect (beyond the router, to which I can always connect) until I changed the laptop IP from dynamic to static, and the DHCP client from automatic to dhclient. All of a sudden, I was back surfing!

Only, just now, when I booted up the laptop again, I couldn't connect beyond the router (which connected fast enough), not until I changed the IP back to dynamic... This is seriously weird and I can't explain it. I wonder if it's got something to do with my router, an instruction that is lost on the way, DNS services that aren't updates... something?!?

WiFi on Linux is NOT easy.

WiFi Woes

Just a little note for posterity:

My Lenovo T61 laptop that now runs Debian has an Intel 3945 ABG wireless network adapter. While the Debian (Lenny) installation and the subsequent upgrade to Sid went flawlessly, with the WiFi card discovered and listed, it wouldn't connect wirelessly to my Netgear router (actually a repeater, fed from a Netgear ADSL modem/gateway). It connected to the router itself, I was able to ping the router and connect to it using a browser, but everything beyond that was inaccessible. I tried various interfaces stanzas, reconfigured TCP/IP, and tested all kinds of tricks, without any success.

Then I did some serious googling. A lot of people have had this problem and many probably still do. Also, the problem was pretty much the same, regardless of your Linx flavour. Finally, a Ubuntu forum suggested removing the network-manager package and installing wicd in its place. Said and done (luckily I had upgraded to Debian Sid; the package is not available in Lenny). I had to reboot but could still not connect.

As a last resort I tried explicitly pointing out my ISP's DNS server IP addresses in the wicd configuration. That did it and I'm now writing this blog on a WiFi connection.

Sometimes it's important to document these things. Maybe, just maybe, it will help someone else.

Linux on the Laptop

Following the unfortunate events surrounding my presentation at XML Prague (a fabulous event, by the way; you should have been there), I now run Debian GNU/Linux as my primary OS on my work laptop. There is a Windows XP partition, so far, but my plan is to use Xen and virtualisation, and run the Windows operating systems as Xen domains.

The laptop installation that failed contained my first attempts at virtualisation, by the way. Microsoft's Virtual PC ran Windows 2003 Server and Cassis, the Document Management System that I'm part of developing at Condesign Operations Support, and was connected to my XP installation through a loopback adapter. In theory, this is a very nice setup since it is possible to simply run a complete image of an OS and the server setup as part of a demonstration and then reset it to its pre-demo state for the next show. In practice, however, Virtual PC does not deliver. The hardware it emulates is very limited and everything it does is rather slow. It was enough to wet my appetite, however (together with my friend Niklas' obsession with Xen), so I decided to do it right, now that I had to wipe the old drive anyway.

My Debian installation does not yet run a Xen kernel, but I'll keep you posted.

I Hate Windows

This blog is about blame. Specifically, it's about Windows XP. If you're into the Microsoft-friendly thing, quit reading.

I held my presentation at XML Prague today. It seemed to go reasonably well until I was about to switch to a demo. I was in Powerpoint and meant to show a little something on the actual application, so I switched to Internet Explorer, or so I thought.

NOTHING happened. Nothing. Zip. Zilch. Zero. Nothing whatsoever.

Nothing. Can you imagine the terror? WTF?

I kept on speaking, realising that my presentation wasn't up to par. Another demo opportunity came up, with similar results.

Nothing.

And that is what happened. Nothing. You explain this, because I can't.

Two Days Left

Well, a bit more than that, actually. See you at XML Prague.

XML Prague Nerves

XML Prague is only a week away so I've been working on my slides. I've done stuff on resource naming (links identifying a resource by name rather than location), markup, linking systems (actually only one, XLink), publishing, "document trees" and more, but it all feels deceptively simple to me. Right now, the whitepaper's most important (and only?) message, use an abstraction layer such as URNs to always identify whatever resources you are using, seems trivial, even. The question, therefore, is if I really am that brilliant at what I do (I'd like to think so, obviously) or if the whole thing is so simple that it doesn't need pointing out, in which case I'm in trouble and people will fall asleep (or worse) at my presentation.

As I said, I do include some other stuff in the presentation, but in my mind it's all a result of the basic premise.

Or maybe it's just me being nervous. We'll see.

XML Is Progress...

...but I miss SGML. I miss the time when any project worth its salt was up to a year or more but would still have to be redone from scratch to create something that actually works.

These days, companies expect these things to work right out of the box. Just install it, give it a week's training and another week of adjustments, and you're all set. I have competitors that market their product in this way, claiming that it's all it takes. Funny, that, because what they are actually saying is that the handling of a customer's most vital asset, their information, should require no more than a couple of weeks to be up and running but the product itself could take years to develop. Is it just me or is there something wrong with this concept?

In the olden times, things were never that easy. There was no DOM and there was no XSLT, and certainly no native, built-in SGML APIs to ease a developer's plight. No fast track, no overnight results. Outputting structured documents on paper was not an easy task so things were allowed to take time. There was time to do a proper analysis, and time to perfect it while others were writing code.

Imagine having that time now, imagine having a year to do things properly. Oh, yes, I miss SGML.

Digital Landfill

Digital Landfill is a blog by John Mancini, President of AIIM International Inc, "an industry association that provides document imaging, document management, and knowledge management solutions". It's very insightful, often very funny, and well worth reading.

I spent half an hour reading it instead of working, but don't tell my boss, all right?

Another Take on TomTom and Linux

Had some time to kill today, so I surfed the net, reading about my new GPS. Turns out that TomTom uses a 2.6 Linux kernel to run their hardware. It's modified, of course, but it's still a Linux kernel.

Why is it that there isn't a Linux version of the software required to connect it to a computer, then? Why is Linux acceptable in the GPS but not outside it?