I'm a big, big Linux fan. I love almost everything about it except wireless. If ever there was a thing that doesn't "just work" it's wireless. Part of the problem is vendors. Vendors aren't really supporting Linux, or they are downright hostile as is the case of the Airport Extreme chipset manufacturer Broadcom (see Airport Extreme vs. Linux for details).

My cases are pretty simple. I have a couple laptops and a desktop. I want the lap tops to work at my home and my work. I want my desktop to work just at home. My laptop uses the orinoco chipset. I can indeed get this machine to work with the drivers included with the kernel, but (as well see is the case with seemingly ALL linux wifi drivers) there is no stability. I had to write a small script to shut down the network, rmmod the wifi drivers (orinoco_pci and orinico), modprobe the drivers, then restart the network. "Why the hell would you do this, Steve?", you ask? Well it's because the damn thing will only work for so long, then phoot! It's gone. I get the same damn level of service from my desktop.

Now my desktop is a special case. Unable to find a PCI wifi card with a supported chipset (it's really damn hard to do this), I finally purchased an SMC card with a driver supported by the ndiswrapper module. If you're not familiar with this module, this is the handy work of some super, extra-ordinary hackers. Based on Microsoft's NDIS driver API, these hackers put together a Linux kernel module that will load and use native MS wifi drivers targeting coded to this spec. It's all very wonderful and nifty and it really works! My desktop is proof for me. But I can only, sadly every rmmod, then re modprobe the ndiswrapper module once before it will lock my system up like a Baptist preacher locks up his daughter.

On the configuration side I've always tried to use the awful (A-W-F-U-L) network configuration software included with Red Hat distributions. It never works the right way for me so I always end up falling back to the nasty little scripts in /etc/sysconfig/network-script. It's not too ugly, and it gets the job done. The reason I mention this is Red Hat is making amends for their ways. They've been working on NetworkManager. It's an application that handles the configuration of network interfaces in the client space. It's all good and nice and a real nifty idea. But as of Fedora Core 4, it still doesn't do much more than squat for me.

I could go on, but I won't. I live with the pain of Linux WiFi because Linux is so sweet and so rich. But damn, if there was one thing I could fix...
- posted Thursday, July 07, 2005 11:24 PM by Steve

 
Last night I installed Fedora Core 4. While trying to get my wireless card working, I foolishly moved some files out of /etc/ndiswrapper. Needless to say, no booty no more. This morning, LNX-BBC saved the day.
- posted Sunday, July 03, 2005 10:46 PM by Steve

 
I've been meaning to post some comments about Home Depot for a while now. I'm a longtime fan of their stores, though once I was the enemy, working at Home Club in the late '80s. I even held stock in their company for several years. Sadly, viciously, ignorantly they've now jumped the retail shark.

On television to "Jump the Shark" is to go to the lame side, where the writers are all recycled from the "I Love Lucy" camp of sad and improbably and down-right silly television. The phrase it self refers to a "Happy Days" episode where Fonzy, wearing a leather jacket, jumps a corralled shark, while on water skis. It's considered to be the moment in the Happy Days saga where the show officially turned south and hit the accelerator.

For retail, I use "Jump the Shark" to mean finally lost their corporate mind and got so cheap to as to ruin a good business with penny pinching madness. Home Depot has done this.

"How the hell has my beloved Home Depot done this", you ask? A few simple moves and they're flying over the shark, leather jacket and all.

1. Tool corral
2. Checking your receipt at the door
3. Automated checkout.

The tools corral
Once this was a not so bad means of controlling shrinkage. Essentially a mini store within a store. You entered the tool corral, and paid for your purchases as you left. If you had more shopping to do, you did it and visited the cashier a second time. The store in Glendale, CA now features easier access to the inexpensive hand-tools, but corralled access the big, expensive, mostly power tools. This makes no sense. People can't lift a table saw, or a shop grinder. The bad part, though, is the fact that I can't get my shopping cart into the corral (now dubbed "register 21") because there is only enough space for one person to pass at register 21. Nevermind when a line of people develop and I'd like to push a cart in (with my son happily seated in the child seat). Really I can't do justice to the idiocy of this setup, you'll just have to road trip here to see it.

Checking your receipt at the door
Never mind that I put my receipt away at the register--along with my credit card, but I *OWN* the stuff by the time I'm at the door. Please don't inconvenience me further Home Depot, I'm already PO'd enough about the other stuff.

Automated checkout
Again, not the worst idea on the planet if you don't mind standing in line behind an angry, leathery 53 year old in a surly booze stupor while he tries to negotiate with a cash register. I really wouldn't hold it against them if they installed the automated registers, but still had a decent number of cashiers on staff, but in their effort to save sixteen cents an hour, Home Depot will have only a single register staffed in the main store. The line to this register will often lead down the lighting isle ending in the last sane person in the store.

There's more that Home Depot is doing wrong. Pallets are left in isles as a way of merchandising, even though only a single cart can pass at a time. Leaving the tall stock ladder on wheels in the tool corral isles, and well...okay my rant peters out here. But you get my point.
- posted 10:00 PM by Steve

 
There are currently two little green bugs slowly suffocating in a plastic bag on the dashboard of my truck. I feel a bit bad about their captivity and eminent demise, but at the same time I'm fascinated by the fact that they were in this bag, almost all day, in my truck, often parked under the full San Fernando valley sun, on a hot day almost 4th of July day, and they're still *at this very moment* alive and literally kicking in that bag.

The bugs look like little grasshoppers, but with short seed like bodies. Like grasshoppers, they have long gangly arms and spookie, feely antennae. Their means of locomotion, like the grasshopper, is the hop. I must conclude that they are some type of grasshopper.

I plucked my victims, one each, off of my two potted elm trees this very morning. They along with throngs of their cohorts had first trashed an entire basil plant much in the way the band the Who was known to trash hotel rooms. I put them in the bag with the intent of exhibiting them to a knowledgeable nursery worker in order to devise a plan to eradicate their species from my garden. I wasn't able to make it to the nursery today.

That basil plant is wrapped in a plastic bag somewhere in a landfill along with twenty or so of my dashboard-bugs' brethren. Once they've been packed deep into the landfill, rolled over by a bulldozer 3 or four times over, I wonder, are they still chompin' away on my basil?
- posted 9:33 PM by Steve