I spent countless hours for a month and half trying NDISWrapper, and other fixes, but the wireless never seemed to work right. Atheros finally released a patch for thier binary HAL, to allow the AR5007EG to work under 32x bit systems on Linux.

This patch is for 32-bits x86 platforms including i686 and AMD CPUs (Thanks strasak!). This patch does not work for 64-bits x86 platforms.

This patch is for the Madwifi driver snapshot r2756 only. Sorry about the wrong information in the original posting.

To apply the patch

1. Download the Madwifi driver snapshot r2756 using the following link and save the file.

snapshots.madwifi.org/madwifi-ng/madwifi-ng-r2756-20071018.tar.gz

2. Extract this driver source and change into the driver directory.

tar -xvzf madwifi-ng-r2756-20071018.tar.gz; cd madwifi-ng-r2756-20071018/

3. Download the patch using the following link and save the file.

madwifi.org/attachment/ticket/1679/madwifi-ng-0933.ar2425.20071130.i386.patch?format=raw

4. Patch the Madwifi driver.

prompt> patch -p0 < madwifi-ng-0933.ar2425.20071130.i386.patch

5. Make and install this updated driver according the instructions in the “INSTALL” file from the madwifi package.

Really leaning towards getting the N810. I’ve been looking at the N800 for a while and really like the demo and compusa.com. I guess i’ll wait for the demo of the Nokia N810 to come to compusa before i make my decision.

Quoted from http://tabletblog.com/2007/10/n800-vs-n810-tableteers-have-choices.html:

TabletBlog.com by ThoughtFix: N800 vs N810 - Tableteers Have Choices

N800 vs N810 - Tableteers Have Choices

Photo courtesy Jonathan Greene of Atmaspheric Endeavors.
He took a bunch more.

Many people recently purchased N800 internet tablets after the price drop and they’re asking if the N810 is going to take over that space. The simple answer is no - The N800 and N810 will be sold and developed side-by-side. This article is for those interested in internet tablets and wonder which is “better.” Again - I will post the disclaimer that I am using a pre-release N810 so some details will be wrong, but I will do my best to avoid specifics and focus on what is known hardware and software.

The two tablets have much in common but each have unique advantages. Let’s look at what each has that the other does not.

N800:

• Dual full-sized SDHC memory card slots for up to 16GB storage.
• Front-facing stereo speakers.
• D-pad access without opening slider.
• Plastic case
• FM radio
• Price point: US $239 on buy.com as of this writing.

N810:

• Sunlight readable display
• GPS
• Sliding Keyboard
• 2GB internal storage
• One MiniSDHC card slot for up to 4 GB (and later 6GB and 8GB) additional storage.
• Price point: Approx. US $450-$479

Now let’s look at the target market for each.

The N800 is cheaper and better suited for multimedia use. With the front-facing speakers and up to 16GB storage. This makes it a better mobile entertainment device. With full-sized SD card slots, it’s also good for photographers on the road who need to upload files directly from their camera’s card. The 800×480 screen is good for previewing images before they are uploaded. Navigation is still available through the use of a Bluetooth GPS receiver. The plastic case and lack of moving parts make it less prone to breaking, so it may be good for a younger crowd too. The lower price point can attract new users, enthusiasts, and hackers as well.

The N810’s GPS and sunlight readable display make it much better for users constantly on the road. The keyboard can attract heavy Email users, bloggers, and instant message addicts. Other than the keyboard and GPS, the evolutionary changes in the Internet Tablet line are in the IT2008 OS, which will be available on the N800 as well.

For a $220-$240 price difference, users get built-in GPS, 2GB internal memory, sunlight readability, and a nice little keyboard. They lose and FM tuner and a card slot. For me, I’d pick the N810 because I also pack a stand-alone music and video player. The N810, paired with a good phone, makes an excellent mobile blogging device. Others (especially music and movie nuts) who do not need extensive keyboard use or constant GPS availability can still be very happy with the N800.

A final note: I realized that there’s more to a GPS than simple navigation. The Nokia N810 is a “location aware” device and is open to location based applications. With WiFi or wireless broadband over Bluetooth, social networking can expand into physical space. Photos and video can be geotagged on upload. People can meet from across a rock festival without getting lost. Expect more on “location awareness” in future editorials on this blog.

Quoted from http://www.tor-forge.com/NewsArticle.aspx?articleId=577:

Tor and Forge Books: Robert Jordan, Beloved Tor Author and Internationally Bestselling Novelist, Dies

Robert Jordan, Beloved Tor Author and Internationally Bestselling Novelist, Dies

New York, NY: September 17, 2007

Tor novelist Robert Jordan (whose given name was James Oliver Rigney Jr.), the beloved author of the bestselling Wheel of Time® fantasy series, died yesterday after a courageous battle with the rare blood disease amyloidosis.

In an entry posted yesterday on Jordan’s blog at www.dragonmount.com, Jordan’s cousin Wilson Grooms wrote that he passed away Sunday, September 16th at 2:45 pm and noted that: “He fought a valiant fight against this most horrid disease. In the end, he left peacefully and in no pain,” and that “his beloved wife, Harriet, was at this side through the entire fight and to the end.”

Tor publisher Tom Doherty said of Jordan: “He was one of the great storytellers of the 20th and early 21st centuries; Jim’s Wheel of Time is a towering epic of power and scope, he was a man of courage and heart and vision but for me, first of all, he was my friend of 30 years.”

Robert Jordan was born in 1948 in Charleston, South Carolina; he taught himself to read by the time he was four, and was tackling Mark Twain and Jules Verne by the age of five. He began writing in 1977 and went on to write one of the most important and best-selling series in the history of fantasy publishing with over 14 million copies of The Wheel of Time series sold in North America (and over 30 million copies sold worldwide). The last three books in the series were all #1 New York Times bestsellers.

Jordan has often been referred to as Tolkien’s heir and in an article about The Wheel of Time series, The New York Times lauded Jordan for his extraordinary story-telling ability: “the books’ battle scenes have the breathless urgency of firsthand experience, and the ambiguities in these novels–the evil laced into the forces of good, the dangers latent in any promised salvation, the sense of the unavoidable onslaught of unpredictable events–bear the marks of American national experience during the last three decades, just as the experience of the First World War and its aftermath gave its imprint to Tolkien’s work.”

Jordan was a graduate of The Citadel, the Military College of South Carolina, with a degree in physics. He served two tours in Vietnam with the U.S. Army; among his decorations were the Distinguished Flying Cross with bronze oak leaf cluster, the Bronze Star with “V” and bronze oak leaf cluster, and two Vietnamese Gallantry Crosses with palm. A history buff, he also wrote dance and theater criticism and enjoyed the outdoor sports of hunting, fishing, and sailing, and the indoor sports of poker, chess, pool, and pipe collecting. Jordan also authored the Michael Fallon historical romance trilogy under the nom de plume Reagan O’Neal and seven Conan novels, from Conan the Invincible (1982) through Conan the Victorious (1984).

Jordan had a close relationship with his numerous fan websites, including www.dragonmount.com, on which he hosted his blog, and other sites including: http://www.encyclopaedia-wot.org/, http://www.tarvalon.net/news.asp, http://www.theoryland.com/, http://www.ageoflegends.net/WoTtrack/, and http://www.wotmania.com/.

The sites participated in a massive internet hunt in 2005 to promote the publication of Jordan’s last hardcover novel, Knife of Dreams, and again recently in a calendar art competition, for which Jordan had just chosen the winners last week. There were also numerous fan stories about relationships that had bloomed because of a common love of The Wheel of Time series. Tor’s website has a snapshot of these from a few years ago at http://www.tor.com/jordan/romances.html

News of Jordan’s death quickly spread across the fan sites yesterday and today with fans writing in from around the world to express their grief and best wishes for his family. Jordan had an incredibly close knit group of fans; an article published on Forbes.com summed it up best in describing fans’ support of Jordan during his illness: “There are readers, and then there are fans. Readers offer condolences when a favorite author falls ill. Fans offer bone marrow.”

With the popular refrain from the Wheel of Time series, where Jordan himself was often affectionately known as the Dragon, Tor says goodbye to a giant in the field of writing: “The Wheel of Time turns and ages come and pass. What was, what will be, and what is, may yet fall under the Shadow. Let the Dragon ride again on the winds of time?”

Robert Jordan is survived by his wife, Harriet Popham Rigney; one son: William Popham McDougal of Houstonic, Massachusetts; one brother: Reynolds W. Rigney of New Orleans, LA; his first cousin: Wilson Watson Grooms, Jr. of Charlotte, NC and numerous nieces and nephews, including James Oliver Rigney III of New Orleans, LA. He is predeceased by his brother Theodore Smith Rigney.

Relatives and friends are invited to attend his funeral services at St. Stephen’s Episcopal Church, Wednesday, September 19, 2007 at 11:00 am. Interment is private but friends may call at the Church Social Hall following the service.

In lieu of flowers, donations may be made in the name of James Rigney to:

Mayo Clinic Department of Hematology — Amyloidosis research
200 First Street SW, Rochester, MN 55905.

For more information about Robert Jordan or to contact the webmaster of Dragonmount, Jordan’s leading fan site, please contact Tor Publicity Director Elena Stokes at: torpublicity@tor.com

 

Robert Jorden was one of my favorite authors, and the first book, i ever finished on my own free will. His writing, his world, grabed me, enticed me, and i’ve been reading fantasy novels ever since. A good man, who will be missed.

Well, sorry for the lack of postings, i’ve been away for the last month on call and spending time with my daughter and such. I promise more content soon.

Every day the IT Industry is changing, whether it is a new technology that is developed, or a change in management at a company. With those changes comes changes in procedures and policies, new do and do not, and usually a cleanup of the current environment.

Spiceworks (http://www.spiceworks.com) is a useful web based application that runs on an internal network, which I have been using over the last few months. When our management changed over to our new owners, they wanted a detailed inventory report for all environments, SPLA licensing, user counts, and a horde of other reports. Spiceworks and an asset and inventory management application that scans the network and reports everything from machine hardware, and serial number (also Service Tag), to software, Operating system version, creates RPD links to quickly access machines, it will even do generic alerts (disk space, anti-virus out of date, etc), and general reports that can be exported to PDF, Excel or document format.

This slew of features is all available for the cost of NOTHING, even with all the features I listed, there are still a lot more that I didn’t. In my opinion this is an invaluable tool for a Systems Administrator. Click the link below to learn more:

http://www.spiceworks.com

A few weeks ago I saw an article on how to run Windows Applications Seamlessly on Ubuntu using virtualzation (VMWare Virtual Box), it got me thinking. If I can do that on Ubuntu, can I do it on Windows (Run Linux applications seamlessly)? Why you ask? Well as I mentioned earlier, I work at a datacenter, even though we user Linux/Unix as servers throughout the datacenter, the management frowns at using it as a workstation. This is mainly attributed to security reasons, with everyone using Windows on their work station it is easier to audit who is doing what and where, and if there is a security leak track it down. I personally have no problem with Windows, but I do find that it is easier to do some everyday task on Linux, a good example is the “whois” command or the grep command, which I use to search through error logs.

This is where virtualization comes in, and a little handy application call Free NX (http://www.nomachine.com), for people who don’t understand what their saying. It is basically terminal services for Linux, except with the add functionality of being able to run just an application instead of the whole desktop if desired. I installed virtual box (http://www.virtualbox.org/), anyone not in tune with what this is. It’s a virtualization application allowing you to run multiple machines as guest OS’s on top of a host OS (Windows or Linux) similar to VMware but lighter on resources on my opinion. After Virtual Box was installed, I created a virtual machine and preceded to install Ubuntu 7.04 Feisty Fawn, the install went perfect without a hitch. I then shutdown the machine and created a virtual network adapter using virtual box’s network wizard, then bridged the connections in Vista so that the Virtual adapter could grab an IP Address from the DHCP server. This has benefits over using the NAT version of networking for Virtual Box that is default.

Next I installed Free NX from www.nomachine.com, this went pretty fast, but beware you have to install the NX Client first, then the NX Node, before installing the server. Once this was installed I followed the instructions in the manual and in minutes (5). I was able to seamlessly run applications from my Linux box on Windows Vista. I’m currently just running gnome-terminal, but I’ve tried Firefox, and also the full desktop mode, all of which works well. But the benefit of just running the terminal is that I can run anything from command line, and it opens on the host.

 I’ll try to get a Guide, and some screenshots up sometime next week.

If you are a geek like me and have as many customers as I do, chances are you spend most of your day in remote desktop sessions in client’s servers fixing their issues, clearing out Citrix sessions, running updates, or any other task you can think of. About two months ago I was browsing around the Internet, looking for some nifty tools to help the day go by quicker. I soon found Terminals (http://codeplex.com/Terminals) this tool is an open source tabbed remote desktop client. So far it has made my life a whole lot easier, no minimizing countless remote desktop sessions trying to find the right one, the only thing I disagreed with was its lack of Citrix ICA functionality.

The author did not have access to a citrix environment, but claimed he was going to add it in someday. Well after a few weeks getting use to the application, I decided to take my limited knowledge in C# and add it in myself, and let me tell you, it’s a godsend. I did forward the changes to the developer, but it has yet to look like it has been merged to the original source.

The download is available below.

terminals.zip

Ramblings of a geek, is just a small hole in the internet where I can put down my thoughts. I’m a 24 year old computer nerd from Hammond, Louisiana. I am currently employed at a Tier IV Datacenter located out of Baton Rouge, Louisiana, as a Network Engineer/SysAdmin. I have a 2 year old daughter, Payton, which is the star of my life, and means everything to me.
So stay tuned!