The Shoes of the Fisherman's Wife Are Some Jive-Ass Slippers

Fri, 16 Jul 2004

Marketing and the Techies

In and interview Bruce Eckel, of Thinking in C++ fame, makes some interesting remarks about Python:

The Python venture is basically controlled by the techies. We make decisions based on what's going to make the life of the programmer easier. Even with C++, which was a standards committee, I remember early decisions being based on worries about the existence of a body of code which was a drop in the bucket relative to what we have now. But they were saying, "We can't make this change in the language because we would break all that existing code," which was basically trivial. We should have made those changes at the time. That was sort of a marketing decision because many of the people on the committee were representing companies who had vested interests in C++ in some way or another.

You can actually say the same about Perl. (-: The difference is between the two languages is remarkable but both are controlled by "the techies". As for Python, I have never had any backward compatibility problems.

Microsoft Point-to-Point Encryption

This week must be the time for getting funky stuff working on my laptop. After my success with the W200 wireless LAN card I thought I would try my luck with MPPE. I used James Cameron's PPTP Client. Unfortunately I got it working within an hour due to the high quality of the documentation and diagnosis section. This is unfortunate because I miss out on that satisfying feeling of working for hours on something and then have it finally work. I guess that's OK though.

This is also the second kernel patch I have applied that wasn't for the exact same kernel version I was running. Both of them applied without any conflicts which has never happened before!

Wed, 14 Jul 2004

W200 Wireless LAN Card

Finally, I've managed to get the wireless lan card that comes with my Compaq Evo N620c working with (Debian) Linux. Who says Linux isn't ready for the mainstream? It was so easy.

Here's what I had to do:

1. Download the latest 2.6.6 source code and configure to your liking. Make sure you do compile in module support and don't compile in Hermes chipset 802.11b support (Orinoco/Prism2/Symbol).

2. For some reason I had only selected EHCI HCD (USB 2.0) support but not UHCI HCD so most of my USB devices couldn't be detected via lsusb. I have no idea why selecting an option labelled USB 2.0 doesn't compile in support for USB 1.0 devices.

3. Download the latest version of the Linux Orinoco Driver from CVS, build and install it.

4. Also required are the Linux Hotplug tools which, when restarted, should automatically pick up the fact that the orinoco_usb module is required and install it.

5. The very last step is to hit Fn-F2 to activate the W200. You can then go nuts and configure the interface using iwconfig.

There are heaps of good tips for the N620c at agriffis' page although they are Gentoo specific, not that there is anything wrong with that.