teh bigbro blog(tm)
Bigbro's foray into the scary world of blogging
06 2005

Thu, 30 Jun 2005

As a dodgy acquaintance of mine commented today:

"I'd love to replace everything in Tom Cruise's house with items 1.5 times the original size.

...but it's fun when they are ;-)

1. Spreading the news about your engagement to your friends

Wed, 29 Jun 2005

...in olive green, parked outside a house with a big yellow steering lock on. Is there a risk someone would attempt to steal a car which is already sadly lacking in wheels?
posted at: 08:50 | path: /observations | permanent link to this entry

While I don't smoke myself, I've always adopted a very open attitude to those who do. Until the recent changes in Ireland, I guess I wouldn't have lasted very long playing music in pubs if I took issue with smokers :-) However, I would like to give a special shout out to the ignorant, insensitive, moronic neanderthals who feel the need to light up while sharing a bus with me - especially this morning when I've been struck down with a rather irritating case of hay-fever. Without the smoke I was going to be sneezing and leaking out all the available fluid in my body through my eyes and nose... with these idiots being so ignorant as to be unable to either get a drag in before or after the bus journey, things are made even more uncomfortable for me.
posted at: 08:45 | path: /rants | permanent link to this entry

Thu, 23 Jun 2005

I have a Belkin 54g 802.11g WiFi card that has been running happily under Windows, providing me with internet connectivity for my x86 laptop. While the laptop is dual boot (Linux is my development platform of choice and the laptop has Fedora Core 3 installed) I've only just got around to getting wireless working on it. While it was not simple, neither was it particularly difficult. Complete instructions follow:

How to get Wireless networking under Linux working with a Belkin 54g card:
1. Get ndiswrapper - unfortunately, the Belkin 54g card uses a Broadcom chipset so the only way I've found to make it work is by using the Windows driver and ndiswrapper.
2. Untar the ndiswrapper package. Obviously, change the filename to reflect the version number you download (tar -xzvf ndiswrapper-1.2.tar.gz)
3. Move into the created directory (cd ndiswrapper-1.2)
4. Make the package (make)
5. You may discover at this point that ndiswrapper refuses to build itself if you're using a stock RedHat kernel with a 4K stack. I used the opportunity to upgrade to a 2.6.12 kernel from kernel.org.
6. I cheated and used the config file (You'll find them in /boot) for the most recent stock Redhat 2.6.11-something kernel. Setting CONFIG_4KSTACKS=n or simply commenting the line out will tell the kernel build not to use the 4kB stack.
7. Build and install the kernel in the usual fashion (make && make modules_install && make install) (There's probably a shorter way to do this...)
8. 'Manage' grub so that it boots into the new kernel and reboot.
9. You will need to cd into the ndiswrapper-1.2 directory and rerun make if it failed with the first time.
10. When it's compiled, install it. (As root : make install) All further steps need to be run with root privileges as network configuration is a security critical part of the kernel.
11. Install the windows driver. I had the CD that came with the card, but once you have the .inf and associated files, you should be able to do it from any location. (From the included CD: ndiswrapper -i /media/cdrom/Driver/bcmwl5.inf)
12. You'll probably want to check that driver is installed and the hardware found. Fortunately, ndiswrapper -l checks that things are working as expected. Output something similar to Installed ndis drivers: bcmwl5 driver present, hardware present should be good.
13. I'll assume you have an Access Point (Commonly called a wireless router) and that you have set up a network with ESSID "wifinet". You can get a list of available Access Points using iwlist wlan0 scanning.
14. You'll be wanting to set your WiFi card to be in 'Managed' mode, in other words, use an access point. (iwconfig wlan0 mode managed) If you don't have an access point you can use Adhoc mode instead of managed, but I'll not talk about that in this instruction set in order to keep things brief.
15. Connect to your access point. (iwconfig wlan0 essid "wifinet")
16. You'll be most likely using some WEP keying. You'll probably want to insert your own key here rather than using the one I've just made up. (iwconfig wlan0 key restricted 1234567890ABCDEF1234567890) iwlist wlan0 key will list the keys as known to the driver for the interface.
17. Adding ndiswrapper as an alias to modprobe is probably a good idea. The ndiswrapper script allows you to do this with ndiswrapper -m.
18. Finally, you'll want to bring up your wlan interface and configure it for connection to an IP network. If you use DHCP you can do a simple dhclient wlan0 - otherwise, you'll need to configure it using ifconfig as per any other ethernet interface. If you're not using DHCP, you'll need to set up some DNS and some routing as well, most likely.
19. I wanted to bring up the wlan interface on boot-up, so I made the following script, which I call from /etc/rc.local
    #!/bin/sh
modprobe wlan0
iwconfig wlan0 mode managed
iwconfig wlan0 essid "myWiFiLAN"
iwconfig wlan0 key restricted 1234567890ABCDEF1234567890
dhclient wlan0

Huge thanks to dredg for PlanetEvil (lite) and to Stewie for PlanetILUG (lite) which means I can view my planet feeds on my Nokia 9500 in comfort.
Thanks dudes... :-)
posted at: 01:07 | path: /technical | permanent link to this entry

Wed, 22 Jun 2005

...so many blondes, so few natural blondes... Why? (not that I don't approve or anything)
posted at: 16:25 | path: /observations | permanent link to this entry

Sat, 18 Jun 2005

The weather is amazingly good - people are actually getting sunburned. Lots of good music, great food, ice-cream (both the Eastern and Western varieties) and loads of other stuffs... It's great :-) Also, there's a fun fair there - about twice as big as the funfair we went to a few weeks back which advertised itself as being 'huge.' If anyone has suitable superlatives for the size of this funfair, feel free to e-mail to the usual address ;-)

Fri, 17 Jun 2005

Disaster has been averted as those extremely kind folk at NOFAP (Nonado Overseas Food Aid Project) a division of nonado.net PLC (Purely for Laughs Crew) have couriered some more teabags to me. Also, thanks to the delivery man who kindly informed me that my front garden was full of wasps. Erm... Thanks for that... I didn't put the wasps there, or invite them in or anything... it kind of goes with the territory and the fact that I have loads of flowers in my front garden.
Here's a picture of the Limerick NOFAP aid package, along with a picture of the writing on the outside of the Cork Chapter's donation, presumably written by some overzealous customs / security official who was wondering wtf these nutters would be sending teabags to England... probably assuming they were some bizarre bomb making substance or cocaine or something :-)

Tue, 14 Jun 2005

I owe a debt of gratitude to NOFAP - the Cork chapter of which mailed me today enclosing a large box of Punjana teabags. The timing could not have been better, given that I was down to my last teabag... I'm most of the way through 100 PG-Tips bags and I've been working away for 2 weeks and gone most weekends too... had I been at home drinking tea the situation would have been critical! ;-)
So thank you Mr. Random Faceless Bureaucrat from NOFAP (Cork Chapter) - I am enjoying the first cup (of approx 120) from the 'aid package' received this morning :-)
posted at: 14:17 | path: | permanent link to this entry

Mon, 13 Jun 2005

...cleared of all charges.
posted at: 22:26 | path: | permanent link to this entry

Freshly picked from the internet, frozen using genuine green giant essence and packing in a TCP/IP frame to be delivered straight to your door...

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/4552737.stm

Brought to my attention by Sinéad for the list of names at the bottom of the page - though it was the comment from the Census re one Alfred Goold that had me laughing out loud:

Alfred Goold - 1901 occupation "living on condensed milk"

http://wiredblogs.tripod.com/sterling/index.blog?entry_id=1130018

Things not to say during a design review... Though many of these universally applicable to lots of useful situations :-)

http://www.ilovejackdaniels.com/cheat-sheets/mod_rewrite-cheat-sheet/

A crib sheet for doing lots of commonly required and useful things with mod_rewrite for apache. Also good for people like me who are just too lazy to go and RTFM :-)

http://www.thingsmygirlfriendandihavearguedabout.com/

Caution! This is just funny because it's TRUE! My example:
I drink a lot of tea - and make it by the mug. So after I've removed the teabag I leave the spoon on the side of the sink - so that I don't have to dirty another spoon when I'm making the next cup (about 10 minutes later.) Every time Sinéad sees a spoon there, she knocks it into the sink... because it's not hygienic... or something... Cue argument, rinse, repeat, etc.

I got bored with the Sudoku craze that seems to be sweeping this country and decided that I may as well play with some perl references and data structures in interesting ways as a method of solving sudoku puzzles. You can download the resulting perl script and have a poke. I'll move the code to www.shonkytat.net as soon as I figure out what Steve's done to break it.
btw, the Sudoku solver is a brute force solver - there are heuristic and logic methods that could be applied to speed up the search for a solution that I've not used. Also, it terminates and prints the grid after it finds the first valid solution - there may be more (I'll provide a method of telling it to continue searching for solutions next weekend maybe.)
Enjoy.
posted at: 11:53 | path: /technical | permanent link to this entry

Sat, 11 Jun 2005

Who could have thought there was so much green in London? Had a walk around the park - reminded me very much of Phoenix Park in Dublin. There was a wedding happening in the Lodge and a Chinese dragon, but unfortunately the guys doing the dragon were having a rest so I didn't get any pictures. It did take me a while to figure out why there were a bunch of lads with shiny trousers on ;-)

Fri, 10 Jun 2005

Ah... the internet... bless its little woollen BGP nodes...

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/cambridgeshire/4077680.stm

Now, I've spent some time in Cambridge - and I'm reasonably au-fait with The Junction. I wonder how many hours these will really last in working order... I'm not cynical or anything... oh no... ;-)

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk_news/story/0,3604,1502284,00.html#article_continue

Erm... yeah... offensive but not grossly offensive... Somehow, I have difficulty in finding sympathy for a company who have not only managed to drive (at least) one of their customers to a state of irritation, but also have decided to not apply any security whatsoever to their customer facing voicemail system. I think justice has been done :-)

Thu, 09 Jun 2005

For Mr. Jakma, who is never known to be grumpy, obtuse, pedantic or embittered on IRC at all, oh no, never... well... hardly ever (cue chorus: "What never?..." etc...) ;-) Here's a lovely picture of my tea mug...

Wed, 08 Jun 2005

Once again the bus to work was approx. 30 minutes late. This is the 3rd time in the last 6 days of going to work that I've waited more than 30 minutes for a scheduled service. I wish the government would take its collective head out of its arse and deal with issues that are actually important (like public transport) and stop trying to pass laws on whether knives should be sold to under 18 year olds, or whether they should have a pointy tip or not. To say the 'Nanny State' of Great Britain has gone mad is now, IMHO, a woefully inadequate assessment of the insanity of the situation. (It is quite comedy that you can get married and drive a car before you're allowed to purchase a kitchen knife though.)
While I'm no political analyst (and know very little about politics, in general) I'm beginning to see why the less rational among our populus can justify it to themselves to vote for such parties as the UKIP and BNP. Even if their issues are (at the very least) distasteful, they are at least brave enough to actually deal with some real issues, unlike what the currently elected group of ineffectual overly-PC MPs seem capable of.

UPDATE:
The bus has now pulled over to the side of the road and the engine has been turned off... Looks like I should have just worked from home today... Nope... we're going again... Aaaaand we've stopped again... And we're going again, though there's a big hill coming up - I don't fancy this bus' chances of getting up it without another rest... *cry*
</rant>
posted at: 11:50 | path: /rants | permanent link to this entry

Sat, 04 Jun 2005

Not really an observation... more of a question really...
Does the fact that you find it quite difficult to take your shoes off mean that possibly you've had one too many when out with the lads?
Answers on a postcard please... or something...
posted at: 00:30 | path: /observations | permanent link to this entry

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